. . .
Cairo had such a vibrant nightlife. There were house parties, there was sitting around on cheap plastic chairs at the cafe and smoking shisha mixed with glycerin. You could choose between walking the streets to the point of exhaustion, sleeping in front of the television, masturbating in front of the computer screen, work, seedy cabarets, or sucking up some of the noise that spilled out of bars and music clubs.
Beer, beer, and more beer.
A friend of Moud’s had just returned from abroad, and was thus permitted by law to purchase four bottles of alcohol on one passport. He donated one for our party that night. After some warm-up beers at Cairo Jazz Club, we were ready for him. He’d brought tequila. We began to commence our rituals, but Mona wasn’t in her best mood. The light was dim. The band was getting ready. Moud was complaining about work.
“Believe me, this country’s a mess. You’ll never be able to understand how it all works.”
Imad, the friend who’d brought the tequila, was an Egyptian-Canadian who had a job at a bank overseas. Mona May was playing with her phone. Kiko moved her head to the music—tonight’s performers specialized in classic Western hits. Some girl from the German University in Cairo (GUC) seemed shocked at everything going on around her.
“What is it you are all drinking? Why do I have to put salt on my hand?”
“It’s cactus juice, darling,” responded Imad, the tequila man. “The salt gives us the patience to endure.”
“Hey, beautiful,” I asked the girl with the black fingernails, “what do you do in life?”
“I study graphic design at GUC.”
“She’s the one who designed the poster with ‘No’ written on it,” Moud butted in. “You’ll remember it from the demonstration.”
Which demonstration? “No” to what, exactly? It didn’t really matter. The important thing was she’d made a poster. In those days, demonstrations were all about posters. Political activism was headline news. Headstrong youth raging against the system got precious screen time on all the satellite channels.
She lit a cigarette and started talking politics. Kiko stood next to me, the boredom visibly gnawing at her soul. The poster girl seemed outraged at something the tequila man had said. Her voice raised as she said something about poverty and hunger.
“I went to this village called Ezbat Antar. You wouldn’t image the suffering of the children there.”
Like many youth in those days—youth in any days, really—she seemed so concerned with poverty and hunger that she forgot how hungry she was herself.
The place started to get crowded. There were high-class prostitutes, and women in their late twenties milking pleasure from the mouth of the serpent. There were foreigners who’d been ravaged by this city and forgotten why they came here in the first place. Mona May went to the bathroom and came back to join us for the first round of shots. Then she met an old schoolmate and went over to chat with him at the bar. I sniffed under my armpit and realized how smelly I was. I’d spent the whole day at work in the street, amidst the scorching heat and choking humidity.
“I can’t stand this heat!” shouted Kiko. “Moud! Why don’t we go to the beach?”
Mona May started dancing with her old friend. She had the lower part of her shirt tied up in a knot just above her belly button, and her breasts tucked up into a white satin bra. She closed her eyes and let go.
At some point, she came back to sit next to me, and took one of my cigarettes. Smoking is harmful to your health and causes cancer. She took out her phone.
“Fuckin’ A,” she blurted out with a smile. “You know who’s coming over?”
“Surprise me.”
“Ihab!”
“Ihab who?”
“Our Ihab. Ihab Hassan.”
“Who’s Ihab?” Moud butted in.
“The guy I told you about,” I said, giving Mona a light.
“Err . . . I don’t remember.”
We had just gotten started on the website. Mona had bought the domain name and server with Ihab’s credit card, while Ihab himself had left town.
“I’ve got some errands to run,” he had said. “We can stay in touch through email.”
A tree of excitement sprouted up inside me. We were on the verge of something big. Mona got up to dance again, while I started telling Moud everything that had happened to me since Ihab took me to the bunker under Garden City. His mouth hung open in utter astonishment.
“Bassam,” he said. “You taking some new kind of drugs?”
“No.”
“You really believe what you’re saying?”
The shock of reason. Reality is a slab of concrete that hits you right in the head and fractures your skull. Before I’d take exams in school, my father would always say, “Concentrate, my boy. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.” I used to get to the grocery store and forget what my mother had sent me for. Was it all some sort of prank? Was Ihab pranking me, or was I pranking myself? Maybe it was a little bit of both.
I didn’t tell Mona too much about the idea behind the website, except that we wanted to publish some important documents. But I didn’t know how far her relationship had gone with Ihab. Had he told her? Did she believe him?
Mona May is certainly capable of believing in a game like this. But you, Bassam. Would you waste your life on a delusion like this?
What do you really know about life, Bassam? I turned to look Moud straight in the eyes.
“Why’re you acting like this is all just my imagination?”
“Suit yourself, man.” He took a shot. No salt. No lemon.
Reem insisted that the filming should take place with as little crew as possible.
“The picture quality isn’t the most important thing,” she said. “It’s Paprika’s last concern. Actually, it would be better if the film had a less professional and more experimental feel to it.”
The solution we came up with was that I would be director and producer at the same time. Tohamy objected at first, but he couldn’t refuse the sum offered up by Madam Dolet. Still, this didn’t stop him from trying his regular bullshit.
“You’ve been mixed up with these people for too long,” he said. “We’ve got more important work to do.”
“They also wanna translate this film into English and show it abroad.”
“We’ve got more important work with Al Jazeera and the other satellite channels.”
“Madam Dolet told you we could make it a series on the BBC.”
“If you’re serious, man, go right ahead.”
I was dancing with the GUC girl when I turned around to see Ihab walk into the bar. He had on a pair of tight black jeans and a blue silk shirt unbuttoned around the chest. Every time we met, Ihab never failed to surprise me. I imagined he took pride in choosing all these fine little details with the intention of capturing people’s attention, and especially my own. A gold metallic bull head hung from a brown cord around his neck. He had one arm around the Tarantino girl and a hemp canvas bag hung over the other shoulder. I ditched the GUC girl and went over to shake his hand. Moud got up too and tried to cover his astonishment with formality.
“All fine and dandy, dude,” Ihab replied, mixing several generations of slang.
He opened his bag and produced a bottle of whiskey. The band got livelier. The GUC girl moved closer to Ihab. The man seemed to have electrified the place. Even at nightclubs, among the cigarette smoke and booze and dancing roosters, Ihab managed to be the center of gravity.
He seemed able to shift shapes seamlessly, less like an actor putting on a mask than a man giving expression to a truly multifaceted interior. He could suck everything in and make it all one.
I agreed with Reem that the documentary should unfold as an interior dialogue between Reem and herself. There would be two Reems. To distinguish between them, one would be veiled, while the other wouldn’t be. We started the filming in her house with a small camera.
“Reem, tell me about your current job at the Society.”
“My work with the Society began a few months ago in Cairo,” replies veiled Reem. “It was all a coincidence. I wasn’t really interested in architecture. But then I discovered that, for the Society, architecture meant more than just construction, or mixing together some rocks and concrete. Architecture is about modifying and conditioning the natural resources of the city in order to better suit the needs of all living creatures, including humans. It also entails the engineering of human beings on three levels—physical, psychological, and spiritual—in order to better condition them to their habitat. This engineering will speed up the wheel of evolution, which, in turn, will help us live up to our most sublime purpose on this planet: to settle the earth, to spread civilization over the land.
“The fact that the Society’s ‘sublime purpose’ coincided more or less with the central mission of the Islamic faith didn’t faze me one bit. What I did find remarkable, however, was the manner in which the Society worked to achieve this. They cared about the minute details of things as much as they did the larger issues. They cared as much about man’s interior design as they did his exterior environment. They cared about the future.”
“And what is your specific position at the Society?”
Unveiled Reem responds, “At first, I was supposed to act as the go-between for the Society’s dealings with organizations that had similar philosophies. As you know, the Society of Urbanists has special protocols for collaborating with dozens of other societies and groups around the world. After the opening of our Cairo branch, we wanted to cultivate new relationships with sympathetic groups in the area. My official duties changed, however, with the arrival of Miss Paprika. She’s the Society’s director of Futurist Planning, and I’m now her assistant.”
“Might you give us more details about the nature of the work carried out by the Society’s Department of Futurist Planning?”
Unveiled Reem replies, “One might compare the Department of Futurist Planning to the shaman of an ancient tribe. Its mission is twofold. First, after gathering ecological and demographic data about the city, it runs this data through a series of mathematical equations—and magical formulas—in order to predict the future of the city. By ‘the future of the city,’ we mean everything for the next fifty years. In accordance with these predictions, the department seeks to prepare for the best, and the worst, to come.
“The department’s second obligation is to devise immediate and totally unrealistic solutions to the city’s current crises.”
“Tell us about the nature of your work with Paprika. As an assistant to the Society’s director of Futurist Planning, does your work involve rendering services of an emotional or sexual nature?”
Veiled Reem replies, “My work for the Society does not involve services of this kind. Quite the contrary. In the Society, the relationship between a manager and her assistant is one of companionship. The manager accompanies her assistant through the corridors of knowledge and architecture. She guides her on a path of personal edification, and helps her to partake in the never-ending project of settling and constructing.
“I consider myself lucky to work with Miss Paprika. She’s something of a genius, with lots of fresh, new ideas about how to modernize and revolutionize architecture and the settling of the Earth.”
“Can you clarify the nature of these ideas?”
Veiled Reem replies, “I believe that it is better for Paprika herself to answer this question. However, speaking for myself, what impresses me the most is her passion for the data. Not just the use and application of this data, but its fabrication and synthesis. There’s something revolutionary about the way she works. She lets us see things we never could before. She lets us see things that never existed, but which she can produce and set right before your eyes.”
Four o’clock in the afternoon.
A small boat sets off along a stretch of the Nile adjacent to the Radio and Television Building. On board are Ihab Hassan and Paprika. The two sit facing each other.
Reem had rented the boat for two hours. The first hour had gone by without a word uttered between its two passengers. Another boat passed by them, blasting a song by the hairy teenage heartthrob Tamer Hosny. On board, a girl in a hijab was dancing among a circle of guys. Another boat passed, carrying a family of Gulf Arabs. A line of stopped cars stretched along the 15th of May Bridge.
Ihab had with him the English translation of Khairy Shalaby’s novel The Lodging House. Every few seconds, Paprika leaned back and glanced upward at the sky. Another half hour passed.
The young boatman looked at his phone.
“Should we head back, then?” he asked Ihab, the other male on board.
Ihab nodded in agreement. The young boatman revved up the motor and started to turn the rudder.
“The decision’s been made,” Paprika said suddenly. “It shall be carried through.”
“I won’t let you take such unfair advantage of everything we’ve built up over thousands of years.”
“But I already have taken advantage, Ihab dear,” Paprika replied with a smile.
They returned to the docks, where Reem had been waiting. She shook hands with Ihab, then took off with Paprika toward Maadi. Ihab crossed Abdel Moneim Square headed in the direction of downtown, with Khairy Shalaby’s novel under his arm. He had made up his mind to bring the temple down on everyone.
“This film,” Reem said at the end of the first shooting. “It will be my last will and testament, Bassam.”
He opened the door wearing a blue robe, his chest showing. This time the golden bull was gone. Yes, I felt excited. Walking through the crowded streets of downtown with all these secrets and mysteries in my head, I couldn’t help but feel important. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences of what we were doing, and I didn’t know much about what Paprika was planning. I wasn’t concerned about the fate of this city. Whatever was going to happen, Cairo couldn’t get worse than it already was. If a giant egg dropped down on it from the heavens and drowned it in thick gobs of yellow yolk, this would certainly be an improvement on things.
I sat down in the same chair. The rage and roar of traffic billowed up to us from Adly Street below. Clouds of honking, hammering, hollering, and hawking. A faint light spilled out of a lone lamp in the kitchen. I noticed this time that his apartment had no ceiling lights. His purple bed had the chaotic look of a battle of some kind, or of someone having slept under it.
The royal lion’s den. The alcove of postmodernism. A flower of pure purple.
“Anything to drink?” Ihab asked.
“Just water,” I said, taking out my laptop.
My mother had phoned me this morning. “Bassam, we miss you. Your nieces and nephews ask about you every day. They wanna see you.”
Even though my mother’s house was only about two hours away from Cairo, her voice seemed like it was coming to me from a galaxy many light-years away. It sounded strange, carrying memories of everything that had happened before I met Ihab and got messed up in all of this. Memories of another person entirely.
My computer’s background was a screenshot from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nothing of my past remained.
I glimpsed a hand poke out from under the purple sheets and turn on the bedside lamp. Ihab was in the kitchen making coffee. He took a bottle of water out of the fridge and put it on the table in front of me with an empty glass. I tried not to look in the direction of the bed, but to no avail. She tossed off the sheets and sat up straight. It was Mona May, in the nude. The bulb of a breast glowed in the lamplight, its nipple black and erect.
The voice of Hal 90001 rang in my head. “Dave, Dave, I’m afraid my mind is going.”
She got up and picked up a t-shirt from the floor, then tiptoed over along the hardwood floor. Her legs glowed in the dark. She had nothing on but black panties and the t-shirt frankly showing her nipples.
“Bisou! Bonsoir!” She kissed me on both cheeks.
Over in the kitchen, a smile spread over Ihab’s face. Only the devil, or the lost and fearful Hal 9000,2 knew why.
“Why you drinking water, Bisou?” Mona asked, noticing my bottle. “Know this, darling: wine gives you truth, beer gives you strength, but water gives you only germs.”
“My oh my,” I replied, smiling and shaking my head.
She bent over and picked up a half-empty bottle of wine from under the table. She poured me a glass.
“So you people hide wine under the table now, do you?”
“No. We were having sex on top of the table,” she replied with utter nonchalance. “We put the bottle underneath so it wouldn’t break.”
Later that day, Ihab showed us the first batch of documents he wanted us to publish. Two days after that, a whole pack of ghosts and demons were chasing him around trying to kill him. The day after that, Paprika’s plan to put an end to Cairo had started to come into effect, with sudden changes to the climate, alterations in the course of the Nile, and shifts below the surface of the earth.
I can still remember this meeting because of the strong flavor of the wine, the faint light, and the rancid smell of mulukhiyyah that drifted in from one of the neighbor’s windows. There was also Mona’s bare thighs, her attempts at foot play with me under the table, and the loneliness that so overwhelmed me I couldn’t perceive the gravity of the battle to come.
I finished the meeting and called Lady Spoon. I paid a visit to her bed in Zamalek and made violent love to her. I gave it to her in the cunt, and from behind too. She collapsed from exhaustion and dozed off, while I went into the bathroom to masturbate. I calmly observed the sensual contortions of my face in the mirror. I could see the reflection of Hal 9000’s red light behind me.
“I’m afraid, Dave. Afraid, Dave.”
THE THIRD FLOWER . . . WHERE DO I PUT THE THIRD FLOWER, REEM?
I was tired, Bassam, and lonely. My pain blinded me to the truth. But let me first ask you a question that takes us to the very heart and soul of the matter: If the forbidden fruit were your daily bread, how would you ever experience climax?
Reem didn’t hate her family. She was their elder daughter. It was they who wanted to suck the life out of her.
While a student in the Faculty of Languages, she met the man with whom she would fall in love. Their secret romance unfolded between his family’s apartment in Heliopolis and the bars of downtown Cairo. Her family wasn’t particularly religious, but they were still conservative. Her parents didn’t ask her to wear the hijab, but she wasn’t allowed out past nine. There was a long list of things she was forbidden from doing.
“Why must I do this, while I’m forbidden from doing that?”
“Because we worry about you, Reem. Because we love you.”
“Spare me your worries, spare me your love!”
College kids were fed up with a lot of things about their country. They forever dreamed of taking off abroad. “I just wanna be left by myself, to find myself.” They would talk about politics with such rage, insulting everyone, but unable to make decisions. Any decision. There’s nothing more difficult than making decisions in Cairo, since it’s Cairo that usually makes decisions for you. How to live your life. Where you can have relationships, and when they can end. When you can eat, how many years of your life will be wasted stuck in traffic. Your chance of getting cancer, the precise timing of your getting hit by a car, the amount of filth in the food you’re forced to eat from the street. The total number of dogs in your life that chase you during the nighttime. You are a slave to this city. The only way to win her over is to sell her your soul in a contract written with blood fresh from your veins.
Reem eventually gave up hope that her boyfriend would take the next step. He seemed ill. His illness infected her too, striking her in the heart and leaving a gaping wound in her soul. She talked to her parents about traveling. At the time, all she could find was a teaching job in Qatar. Her mother was terrified at the prospect that her daughter might live so far from home, surrounded by dangers she couldn’t possibly imagine. Her father was concerned, but had more faith in his daughter. All Reem wanted was to get away from this city and everything it contained, away from this failed romance that made her cry for hours over the phone, and cut herself with a razor in the bathroom.
But travel only brought her more misery. Instead of saving her from hell, her journey threw her into solitary confinement. Doha was a wasteland. Its grand corniche stretched along miles of uninspiring shoreline. An underclass of imported labor vastly outnumbered the wealthy locals. On only her second day there, she collapsed from sunstroke while wandering through the empty city streets.
She could only stand it for three months. She was told that no one ever walks outside here. In beautiful Doha, we only walk inside our great international malls, where we shop at our international boutiques and eat at our international restaurants. Like the other cities of the Gulf, ours is an international city. Yet we aspire to become an intergalactic city like Dubai.
She came back worse than she’d left. She wasn’t even able to taste freedom, or escape her family’s love. Devastated by her leaving but unable to end the relationship, her boyfriend finally made up his mind.
At sunset, young men climb to the rooftops. They wave a great big red flag and whistle to bring the pigeons back to their nests. The greatest of Cairo’s pastimes involve launching things into the air and waiting for them to come back. Some toss out paper planes tied to a string. Others unleash pigeons, whether as a hobby, or as a business, or as a private fantasy of flying.
Reem married her college sweetheart. Not for love, as she thought at the time, but because both of them had failed to escape. Cairo had determined their course in life. It set down the cornerstone for their home, and cemented it in place with suspicion and paranoia.
They lived together in an apartment he had inherited. It was the same apartment where I’d later accept her invitation to a bottle of whiskey. We would stay up talking and teasing ’til six in the morning, when we finally melted into bed like honey.
Her relationship with her college sweetheart—his name was Tamer, by the way—didn’t go so well. Like all young intellectuals in Cairo, they suffered from what they call alienation, simply because their ideas about basic human dignity differed from those of everyone else. What’s more, Cairo herself never gave them a single opportunity to forget who they were or what they needed. As a result, their personal problems would erupt into torrents of saltwater. They’d suffer periodic bouts of isolation, from which they would only return at the top of their lungs. And then alcohol, alcohol, and more alcohol. And finally, an assorted mix of chemical cocktails and illicit drugs.
During one such period of desolation, Tamer had an affair with an American girl who lived in Cairo. Most likely she was a student, almost certainly she was in love with Cairo. She was sad enough, and just the right amount of happy. They met five times, first at the party of a mutual friend. They spoke briefly about her research, which surely involved a doctoral dissertation on the comparative mating rituals of the drainpipe roaches of Cairo and the sewer rats of New York, and the influence of both on the rise of political Islam in the Middle East. He engaged her thrice in intercourse. On one of these occasions, he got annoyed with her insistence that he wear a condom, so he threw it away and came right inside her. “That’s the best feeling I’ve had in my life,” was what the girl said in English.
The affair ended with Tamer slamming the door in the girl’s face after he had spun some made-up argument. He came back to Reem, only to get an email shortly thereafter from the American girl saying she was pregnant and had decided to go back to New York and keep the baby.
He came back and cried. His relationship with Reem fell apart. He left her and followed the American girl to New York, only to return after six months, a few days after the baby was born.
He and Reem were officially divorced. They remained friends, however, occasionally sharing an early breakfast at one hotel or another overlooking the Nile in Garden City.
Is this the end of Reem’s story?
Was I able to get it all down in less than two pages?
It’s astonishing how I’m able to recount the whole story in just three minutes, yet when I try to remember the totality of its effect on me, I feel I’d need a lifetime to do it justice. Indeed, I can remember almost everything that happened back then, but can’t remember what I did just yesterday. This is what they call old age.
Paprika can not only read your thoughts and predict what you’re about to say, but she can also project new memories and sensations directly into your mind, altering your perception of yourself and the world around you. For example, she might fool around with the color receptors in your brain, making you see red instead of green or purple instead of pink.
Paprika has the power to be in more than one place at once. She has a total of seventy-seven companion spirits—the result, they say, of having lived seventy-seven lives. Each companion spirit is unique, with its own language, mind games, and supernatural tricks. The knowledge of each flows in mighty streams, which all deposit into the lake of Paprika’s mind. They say the sum of her knowledge is seventy-seven times greater than that of any individual within the Society or without. Rumors of her powers echo across the dome of the sky. It is said that her true and complete story is preserved on a single rock among millions at the Machu Picchu3 complex, and is protected by a special curse.
Some say she is the chosen one, the mother of all, the first female who decided to seek refuge in the cave. A special cult once surrounded her in ancient Syria; she fits the general description of the savior in the holy book of the Druze. All the Society’s experts in the sciences of the soul confessed that Paprika, unlike all others, was a closed book.
And yet, never did she entertain such rumors herself. She detested the reverence of her followers and devotees, and spurned their pitiful beliefs and superstitions. Believers of any kind were a nuisance to her. Sounding like a cartoon character dubbed in formal Arabic, she would say, “The mind alone do I worship. Out of my way, you pious scum!” In her mind, all she was doing was using logic and reason to find radical solutions to the current state of things.
Reem was sitting at home wearing only a pair of white panties with red and orange flowers. She struggled to breathe under the heat and humidity, and gradually became drenched in salty layers of sweat. The dog paced back and forth between the office and the living room. Her mind tried to figure out when it would be appropriate to light the cigarette she held in her fingers. That’s when she heard Paprika’s voice cutting through the fog.
“Where do you want me to put the flower, Reem?”
Reem spread open her palm, revealing a white rose.
“And the other flower?”
Reem spread open her other palm, revealing another white rose.
“And the third flower? Where do I put the third flower, Reem?”
. . .
I always loved Gawaboura. Only a few years younger than me, he was full of the patriotism and passion for change so typical of college kids. Not long after graduating, his tone began to change. “Fuck this country and her mother,” he would say. “To hell with passion, to hell with change.”
His relationship with Egypt became strained. So did mine. The country dumped me and broke my heart, and my relationship status on Facebook changed accordingly. The two of us began to lose passion. Gawaboura stopped going to demonstrations, and I stopped following them in the news.
Still, Gawaboura possessed such an endearing lightness of soul—or was it just his special smell—that I always felt the need to check in on him now and then. One day, we ran into each other at the office, where he’d come to take a position as a graphic designer.
“Where you been, man? What you been up to all this time?”
Sitting down to a computer, he looked like a serene little Buddha.
“Been workin’. And huntin’.”
“Huntin’ what?”
“Fish . . .”
“Just like ol’ Muhammad Taha?”
“Muhammad who?”
“Taha . . . the singer.”
“There’s a singer named Muhammad Taha?”
“Shit, man, you ain’t heard of Muhammad Taha?”
By the waters of the Nile we sat and fished. The voice of Muhammad Taha serenaded us from my phone. While working on our latest film—The Disappearing Nile—I decided to involve Gawaboura in shooting some scenes with amateur fishermen. Some of them were set up along the bridge, while others sat by their lonesome selves along the shore. They knew each other by name, and felt a certain intimacy even when hanging around together in silence. One was an old taxi driver who told me how he met his best friend, Hagg Muhammad, on his first outing here some twenty odd years ago. They would only ever meet when they fished.
“He was more than a brother to me. When my wife was about to give birth to our first daughter, I ran out here to the shore one night, with no more than one hundred Egyptian pounds in my pocket. I was frantic, not knowing how I’d be able to feed the girl or buy her clothes and whatnot. Hagg Muhammad patted me on the back and said, ‘Cast out your line, my dear boy, and you’ll do just fine.’ So I cast out my line, and he came over and put one hundred bucks in my pocket!”
When we finished filming the next morning, this very same taxi driver offered me a lift downtown. He ended up charging me thirty bucks.
Amidst all the traffic, the road rage, the scorching heat and lingering clouds of smut, driving in Cairo for a living was a profession for the brave. “This isn’t just a job,” he told me. “We’re out here fighting on the front lines.”
Another taxi driver told me, “What I do each and every day on the streets of Cairo is more than anything I did in the ’73 War.”
Gawaboura laughed and said, “Really, man? What division did you fight in?”
Without taking his eye off the road, the older driver responded, “Civil defense.”
We both fell silent. I looked over at the driver, noticing his awkwardly matched clothes and bitten fingernails. From the back seat, Gawaboura started talking to me like he’d forgotten our veteran of the road was still there.
“What I wanna know is what they’re gonna do with that fish.”
“That ain’t no fish, dude.”
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know. But I can try to find out.”
Gawaboura had just appeared on the front pages of a number of tabloids and scandal magazines. He’d felt something heavy at the end of his line, and reeled it in to discover a creature with pink skin, roughly the size of a three-day-old child. Its feet and gangly arms ended in what looked like hooves. The fishhook was caught in its behind, which dripped blood as the creature squiggled and squirmed. Gawaboura was stricken with panic, thinking he’d just pulled out a newborn child that someone had cast away in the river. Yet unlike any human child, this creature had no face. Instead of a neck, it had a small protrusion at one end topped with two small antennas.
Gawaboura decided to take a picture of this godforsaken creature, which he still insisted was a fish, and called the police. (Why the police, for god’s sake?) The police, in turn, called the paramedics. (Why, for god’s sake, the paramedics??) And the whole thing exploded into an urban legend about an adulterous woman who’d given birth to a deformed child and tossed it away in the river.
Our veteran of the road dropped us off at Talaat Harb Square. Gawaboura went on his way to the Townhouse Gallery, and I headed over to Ihab’s place on Adly Street.
I could never stand small children. Can’t stand them now, won’t stand them ever.
“These aren’t just any children,” Ihab said, looking over the pictures. “They’re imported from abroad.”
He zoomed in on Gawaboura’s fish pictures. But this was no fish. It was one of a batch of children that had been imported from Japan.
At that point, there were three things we knew for certain:
• Paprika would never give up her plan to finish Cairo.
• Paprika had already begun to implement her plan.
• Paprika was in possession of tools and techniques the likes of which we couldn’t begin to imagine.
In light of all this, Ihab was of the opinion that we should maintain a series of safety buttons, ranging in color from yellow to orange to red. Our “red button,” pathetically enough, was to launch our website with a single click, thus publishing our trove of documents and statistics, which might very well bring about the end of the Society and lead to the exposure of all its secrets.
“She probably won’t care about any of this,” Ihab was saying. “In all likelihood, she’s attached to the romantic notion that the Organization is protected by the very laws of the universe.”
Ihab didn’t know that the universe already was Paprika, and Paprika the universe, in all of its laws.
Ihab first realized there was something missing in his life when he found himself standing for the second time in front of Arata Isozaki’s Tsukuba City Center in Japan. As he silently contemplated the complex of buildings, a poisonous blue substance coagulated around his eyes before seeping into his ocular veins and settling into a small corner of his heart.
Another time, he was flipping through a book of photographs about modern architecture in Europe, when he came across Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. An even greater quantity of this poisonous blue substance shot through his eyes and deposited itself in the tissues of his brain. In that moment, he sensed that something was not quite right. He had noticed a flaw in design, an ungoverned error. This was disturbing, since even errors—intentional or not—were always governed by certain rules and constraints.
He could only explain this with reference to the particular tendency of postmodernist architecture to avoid the abstractness of the Bauhaus School, preserving just enough detail to toy with our notions of history and aesthetics, and consistently blurring any line between the two. The effect was to make bad art appear to be no more than a matter of perspective.
Of course it’s a matter of perspective. But what about the functional element of architecture and design? Where did he stand on all of this?
It’s true that this museum’s primary function was social and psychological. Its function was to make the residents of the city feel important, and to mediate their sense of collective identity. It’s also true that museums, in the end, are a reflection of how particular artists view themselves and their relationship with the world around them. But what happens when these artists are “true” artists?
We’ve all heard that phrase. You might wear it like an advertisement, a fracture in your skull, an identity and an image all at once. You wear it in the street, at the bar, when you’re cutting a deal or speaking at a conference. “I am a true artist,” you say.
With his signature, the true artist will judge what counts as true art. Even if he’s the kind of revolutionary artist that refuses to sell out to corporations, and violently attacks the powers that be. He’ll still think that what he produces is genuine, pure, and deserving of attention. He’ll call it art. His art, true to the touch.
And so, Ihab was struck with a dilemma. Might not the “truth” of art conflict with its duty? That is to say, the duty art has to be functional?
To be sure, Ihab’s question reflects a certain critical self-confidence, and a laughably blind faith in the existence of absolute determiners of right and wrong. Moreover, his question betrays a belief in the “duty” of art and the obligation of the individual to his surroundings. All these notions are susceptible to doubt, even by Ihab himself.
But he was now advanced in age. He had become dispirited. His ties to the Organization made it difficult for him to express his true opinions about such matters. Indeed, his public face as a professor of comparative literature and cultural criticism was just the tip of a tremendous iceberg.
His questions about the functional duty of art, architecture in particular, led him back to the ideas of his grandfather, and then to the Bauhaus archive.
The glorious bastards had designed entire worlds. There were detailed drawings that had taken years to complete, depicting a world roughly the size of Earth, but rectangular instead of round. Humans would live inside it, rather than on the surface. Another group of glorious bastards made detailed conceptual drawings of the nerve networks inside the brain, modeled on the mind of a woman called Hazel Jelinek.
Ihab dug deeper. He traveled to New Zealand and Japan. He vacationed in Prague. His meetings with many of the older members led him to more questions, which led him in turn to investigate the Organization’s true functionalist purpose. Along the way, his questions aroused the murmurings and suspicions of members around the world.
In the city of Arica, in Chile, there was a young man who specialized in the aeronautical mechanics of insects and microscopic creatures. He was having sex with a forty-something woman, a member of the Society’s Administrative Council. The details here are important. This woman was a housewife with two children. She met her young lover through the Organization, when he asked her to help him find a way to travel to Uganda to complete one of his research projects. He went to Uganda, where he received word of Ihab Hassan’s work. He returned to beautiful Arica and reconnected with the woman, who invited herself over to his house. The young man fucked her like a runaway train. He licked every inch of her body, then attempted to penetrate her from behind. This she found painful, so he went slower. Her face writhed with pleasure, encouraging him to take his time. He could see clearly now. He turned her head toward his and planted a kiss on her lips—the kind of pure, sensuous kiss that comes from being seized by the light of a fundamental truth.
He whispered in her ear, “Moving forward. Maybe that’s all there is: moving forward without end.”
The young man’s words reached Ihab in a text message as he was strolling down Fifth Avenue in New York. He raised his head to the sky above.
Ihab’s life would never be the same. Perhaps this was like one of those Chinese stories where the key to your salvation lies only a few feet in front of you, but you don’t see it because you’re looking behind.4
On the dilapidated facade of an old building in Rod El Farag, there’s a sign that reads: “Doctor Ahmad Mahmoud Hamed, MD in Internal Medicine.” The sign is sun-bleached and covered in dust, its paint cracked in several places. The building’s entrance is plastered over with flyers. “The International Weight-Loss and Fitness Center.” “We treat baldness, sexual impotency, and all men’s illnesses.” “Treatment for hepatitis B and C. Diabetes cured for good, God willing.” Each has a phone number written at the bottom.
You see these sorts of flyers spreading everywhere around Cairo. What’s strange is that nobody can tell you when it all started. On public buses, for example, you’ll find a flyer advertising phallic extension, breast enlargement, and breast reduction, all without the need for surgery. On lampposts and telephone poles you’ll find flyers advertising treatments for hepatitis and diabetes. The addresses listed are usually vague, with only a telephone number to go by.
With a small camera in one hand and Ihab in the other, Bassam started up the building’s stairs. They stopped in front of a wooden door. Smiling, Ihab rang the bell. Bassam, as usual, was equal parts confused and excited.
A bald, thirtysomething man opened the door. Uncut toenails stuck out from his leather sandals, his clothes were a simple arrangement of earth tones, his face was half shaved. A perfect specimen of the “wild rhinoceros,” one of Cairo’s most famous fauna.
“Peace be upon you.”
“The center opens at eight o’clock.”
“We have an appointment with the Doctor.”
“Yes.”
“Please, come in.”
In marked contrast to its exterior, the apartment was nicely kept and smelled of a mix of fresh perfumes, disinfectants, and incense. Everything was painted in shades of white or blue, even the chairs and bookcases, which were wrapped in plastic coverings to protect them from any pollutants the patients might have in their clothes. Some of those who came here had physical illnesses. Others suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder. A number of the women and girls had come in search of a measure of self-confidence, or for a short thrill followed by an extended period of relaxation.
The wild rhinoceros disappeared behind one of the many doors that surrounded the waiting room. He came back out to open a different door, and gestured for us to enter.
“The Doctor is waiting for you.”
To Ihab, the Doctor represented a potential ally. Maybe he could help him in his fight against Paprika, and maybe he couldn’t. Ihab wasn’t counting on him too much. But at the very least, he might serve as a sort of buffer or restraining device while he prepared his secret weapon: publishing the documents and bringing down the temple.
The Doctor’s older than anyone Bassam’s ever seen, but he’s all in one piece. Nicely parted hair, like the actor Mahmoud Yassine, and no glasses. A large wooden pipe, engraved with strange markings, hangs from his mouth. Its smoke fills the room. In addition to the Doctor’s desk, there’s a bed and a glass cabinet full of medicine. An antique scale, alone in the corner, probably doesn’t really work. Everything’s a mix between the sublime and the decadent, between the noble and the debased.
The name on the sign outside the building isn’t the Doctor’s real name. It’s one of many he hides behind. You see, his real age is approximately 174 years. In order to live that long, you have to change your address every now and then, and get used to carrying a fake ID. It’s necessary, too, that you avoid the outside light as much as possible, and shield yourself with protective layers of insignificance. With more than one life, you’ll be able to complete your true mission.
The Doctor does not concern himself with the Organization’s internal power struggles. For decades, he’s been occupied with his own research: hypnotherapy and its physical effects on both the therapist and the patient. The results have been rewarding. Some years ago, he found a way to treat certain forms of cancer in their incipient stage. By intervening in the pathways that connect mind and body, he was able to influence the arrangement of particular cells and tissues. Besides his scientific research, the Doctor is known in the Organization as the “Guardian of the City.” Specifically, he is the guardian appointed to Cairo. It’s the same position that Paprika would later offer to me, but for 6th of October City.
A pack of dogs barked in the distance. It was almost four o’clock, and the kids in the street would still be playing until the sun went down. The curtains let in only a faint glow of light. The Doctor stood up to greet us, without extending his hand.
“Please.” He gestured for us to take a seat.
Ihab tossed the day’s paper down on the Doctor’s desk. The front page was covered in images of the fish-child. With the calm detachment of a man stirring his tea, Ihab said, “Have you seen this?”
The Doctor looked down at the pictures and said coldly, “Some new kind of fetal deformation?”
Like sugar dissolving in tea, Ihab replied, “What you see here is a kappa.”5
The Doctor raised the paper to his eyes, took a long drag of his pipe, and said, “This here is no kappa.”
Ihab sat down and said, “It’s a genetically modified kappa. I have evidence that Paprika is responsible for it being here.”
“However modified it might be, I doubt it would be able to survive in the Nile’s water.”
“Perhaps it was attempting to acquire further modifications.”
The two men fell silent. They exchanged glances like sugar dissolving in tea.
. . .
No one would call what’s happening now “chaos.” They would use other terms and expressions with generally positive connotations.
The languages you hear in the streets—a mix of New English, Chinese, and French with traces of Arabic—testify to the energy and ambitiousness of the moment. People are finally proud of their diversity.
During my meeting with Paprika in the restaurant, she explained that one of the many positive outcomes of what happened was that humankind had now reached a point where it was ready to move beyond the narrow nationalisms imposed by modern states and their militaries. This could be achieved thanks to the new economy. Large corporations should be given freer rein to operate. The most powerful corporations will inevitably be in construction and real estate, thus it is necessary that the Society become one too. Perhaps it should become the only one, and competition could take place as a nice little game between its various subsidiaries.
“Look at them all, Bassam. For the first time, everyone loves each other. We’ve gotten rid of the past and created a future that, while not totally perfect, promises some real light at the end of the tunnel.”
During the Storm, we lost thousands of artists here in Egypt. Humankind lost many times more in cities around the world that experienced similar devastation. So many were lost that I could no longer remember who was alive and who was dead. I stopped caring, until one day I heard two guys on the bus saying how Samira Said had died in the Storm. Death is inevitable, but at least there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Now, twenty years later, the memory of Samira Said is preserved at the Laboratory for Archiving and Documentation. Her data and works are displayed next to those of Umm Kulthum.
The younger generations often confuse the two artists. For these forward-looking children of the future, both women belong to the time before the Storm. The world was a whole different place.
Which brings us back to the exhibition called Love Letter for Frogs. Nine artists were involved, the oldest of whom was only five when the Storm struck. One of them had created a pastiche centered on a laughing Samira Said, her teeth sparkling in the flash of the camera. Above her, the phrase “It’s too late” was rendered in Arabic calligraphy, alongside a green sun and a clock stopped at a quarter past nine. The image’s frame was a string of colored light bulbs.
I stood back and watched as the exhibit’s mostly young attendees passed by the picture. They would pause for a few seconds—sometimes even a few minutes—and pretend to be absorbed in contemplation. Or perhaps they really were absorbed in contemplation. I spoke with some of the attendees and shook hands with the work’s artist. Not one of them seemed to notice the discrepancy between Samira Said and the words strung above her, which properly belonged to Umm Kulthum. This is assuming that they were able to read the Arabic script in the first place. Many in this new generation had never learned the Arabic alphabet, knowing only the Latin characters, which generations before had started to be used to write Arabic in online forums and social media.
After the Storm, new theories in psychology were devised that happened to dovetail with the policies of construction and real estate companies. They would be applied to the re-engineering of the individual, the re-engineering of the family, and eventually the re-engineering of society as a whole. Among the new clinical-scientific fads that swept the world was the idea of “exterminating nostalgia.” This went beyond the treatment of the shock and agony suffered by many as a result of the loss of friends and loved ones. Even after such emotional disturbances had been corrected, it was still difficult to control the unexpected relapses that might occur when a patient happened to hear an old tune, or catch a clip of an old movie.
Numerous new studies warned of the dangers of listening to old music—that is, music from the pre-Storm era. This could result in unsafe levels of nostalgia, driving patients to tears or draining them of the energy that was so desperately needed for construction and development.
Look ahead, to the future.
“If pain prevents you from moving on, just tuck and tumble.” “If there’s a lump in your throat, swallow it down and keep on chewing.” These were the slogans peddled by the latest schools of psychology, as well as by the new corporations for self-improvement and individual rehabilitation. I’d smile when hearing such propaganda, as I knew that “moving on” is an illusion and forgetting a matter of perspective. It tickled me more to see how they attempted to repaint the past, exaggerating the beauty and perfection of a Cairo that never existed. It was a circular process: implanting beautified memories, propagating them, and then asking that they be forgotten.
Such was the Society’s new modus operandi under Paprika. Life was a circular process, pointless and without end.
Then one of the masked assassins stuck a short reed between his lips. Standing only three meters away, I could hear the air rush out of his lungs as he fired at me. For a split second I thought of trying to dodge the dart, but decided it was hopeless. It struck me in the shoulder, and I collapsed like Jell-O. Before my lights went out, I saw blood pouring out of Moud’s chest, a dagger lodged right in his heart. The cold corpse of a masked ninja lay next to him. Moud had managed to crush his skull just before succumbing to the fatal blow. I didn’t know if I was dying, or if this was just one of Paprika’s sick jokes.
I woke up in my modest little apartment in 6th of October City. Everything seemed to be normal, except that the floor and furniture were all covered in a thick layer of dust. As I stretched out my legs I realized I was on the living room sofa, drowning in a pool of my own sweat.
It was all over now. I wasn’t sure, but I could feel it. I opened my fridge, but found I was out of bottled water. I went over to the tap, but it was dry. I went back and stuck my head in the freezer, licking the ice off its walls.
I sometimes get asked, “You lived through the naksa, you were there for the dust storm and the quakes . . . Tell us, Bassam, how did you survive?”
In such instances I smile and pretend to be moved. I chew the sorrow I’m supposed to feel like a piece of gum, spit it out, and say, “I had an apartment in October. Never left the house.”
My questioner nods his head in understanding. He won’t want to ask anything further. Everyone’s lost someone he loved in the Storm, everyone needs consolation. No one wants to open another man’s wound.
For the first few years following the nakba, I felt that Paprika was right. I felt like a complete fool for putting so much faith in Ihab Hassan.
Paprika was right, I said to myself, as the supermarket attendant smiled and handed me my order. The city had been a terrible burden on its residents.
After the nakba, I felt incapacitated. I wandered aimlessly through the streets of October, and couldn’t sleep at night. I was in a state of shock. My mother died a year and a half later. I abandoned my friends one after the other, despite their pleas that I should try to engage. I stuck to my apartment, to life in the ruins of the nakba.
I watched people change. I watched them undergo shock, only to regain consciousness amidst a world drowning in tears and nightmares. As the economy collapsed and famine began to spread, I watched the mounting of international humanitarian aid campaigns of historic proportions. Then I watched as the people of Egypt rose from the ashes—all this in the course of only five years. A new Egypt appeared. This wasn’t the “Egypt” people had known before. It carried the same name and represented roughly the same geographic area, but was no longer bound by hand-drawn borders. The entire world had begun to change. What had happened in Cairo repeated itself along roughly the same lines in New York, Copenhagen, Fukushima, and a number of other major cities I’m not sure I can remember at the moment. Earthquakes, tsunamis, and strange, unexplained sandstorms.
To a large portion of the human race, it seemed that the Day of Resurrection had arrived. Others insisted that there was still light at the end of the tunnel.
The Society expanded its reach. It reinvented itself as a global alliance of nine corporations, which soon grew to include twelve, then twenty-one, then ninety-nine of the world’s largest companies. Together, they ruled the world. Together, they were mere puppets in the hands of Paprika. The exposure that Ihab thought would spell the end of the Society had, in fact, only made it stronger.
The Society—let us now call it the Corporation—controls sixty percent of the world’s agriculture. It manufactures everything from automobiles to medicine, has invented a second version of the Internet, and has expanded into the arms trade with record sales to some of the world’s leading security firms (these were, in fact, merely subsidiaries of the larger “mother” corporation). It is involved in the recycling of seventy-five percent of the world’s waste, and provides security for nuclear reactors. It has developed new communications technologies, including chips that can be implanted in your head and allow you to call and connect with others. For those who, like me, are troubled by such human-machine hybrids, the Corporation also manufactures smart devices in the shape of traditional telephones, wristwatches, and shirt buttons. And that’s not all. The Corporation also runs the world’s major media conglomerates. It owns hundreds of name brands in children’s wear, in addition to special lines of clothing that include men’s boxers, nightgowns, sparkling women’s undergarments, and jeans for both men and women and everyone in between. It offers a diverse array of pornographic materials.
The whole world was changing. Finally, in the course of only about ten years, the era of nation-states was coming to an end. The involvement of national governments in politics and the economy became no more than a formality, reminiscent of the role played by the monarchs and figureheads of ages past.
The nightmarish cities that had been founded by the old nation-states were destroyed in the dust storms, earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes. Some were swallowed up by the sea. The cities that survived were reformatted and recolored by the Corporation. Borders were melting away, geography was getting a facelift.
All of this was taking place outside, while I sat inside my apartment. In the morning, I’d work on making documentary films about this new “settling of the earth” and the spread of civilization. At night, I’d curl up in a ball next to the window, or masturbate in bed while staring at the ceiling.
I wasn’t oblivious to everything. I just wasn’t on the winning team. Not much mattered to me here anymore—even Mona May had left the country. We’d decided to maintain a minimum of contact. She was able to live her life for a while, taking painkillers and training herself to forget. But she eventually got bored with life in the cold north. She returned to Cairo—or what remained of it in the area of 6th of October City—and withdrew like me into spiritual masturbation. In the meantime, I had managed to train myself to feel just enough sorrow to keep on living.
“Cairo shouldn’t have to be like this. Life shouldn’t have to be like this. Reality can be different. We can change things. We can intervene to stop all this bullshit.” Thus spoke Paprika in an address to the Supreme Council of the Organization, whose members had assembled in Ihab’s apartment on Adly Street.
“We let them get carried away with their own foolish ideas,” she continued, after a digression on theories of mind control and masturbation. “We let them keep putting up more walls and barriers everywhere. They continue to suffer. In their midst, we suffer too. Why don’t we do something instead of just sitting around philosophizing for our entire lives?”
“Sitting around and philosophizing is what we’re supposed to do,” Ihab interrupted. “We ask, we question, we push for ever greater understanding. That’s the meaning of our existence as the Society. That’s the meaning of life on Earth. We can’t just say we know everything for certain and go on making judgments about right and wrong.”
“But how can we know the value of our greater understanding,” Paprika continued, unperturbed, “if we don’t put it to the test? How can we trust our wisdom if we don’t engage with reality? What I’m calling for is, in spite of its cruelty, an essential part of our quest for knowledge and understanding. And I’m quite confident that everyone in this room has many ideas for research that can only be pursued if the current reality is radically altered.”
Reem was watching all of this. She was watching, and listening.
When she got naked for the first time with Paprika, and the bitch stuck her tongue in her pussy, she cried.
Out in the world, Reem was under siege by masked assassins carrying poison blow darts. They lingered in the shadows of her guilty conscience, and sought revenge for her rebellion against the dictates of family and religion. Their presence could be felt in the hypocrisies of society, in the infidelities of loved ones, in her rumbling storms of depression and anxiety. But in here, with Paprika, she was having her pussy licked.
Paprika suddenly raised her head and stood up to embrace the tearful Reem. She whispered in her ear, “All the pain you feel is an illusion. An evil illusion. Toss back your head and shake it all off, my little one.”
But Reem had reached that point of despair where illusion was the only hope. Her entire life had been a series of impulsive love affairs and long flirtations with belief, interrupted by brief but potent revolutions of doubt and disappointment.
The first of these affairs was with God and religion. Wrapped in a veil, she would accompany her father to the Mosque of Sayyida Nafisa (may God honor her memory). Then came doubt. In college, she protested against the absence of social justice, and would cry on the shoulder of her boyfriend and future husband. Then again came doubt, this time in ideology. She would place her trust in love. Then love would wither like an unwatered plant, and so she would put her faith, at long last, in herself. It was during this phase that I began to love her, but she decided to leave in the middle of the night and sleep on the couch.
Paprika’s voice again: “Throw your head back and shake it all off, my little one. All these wicked thoughts are like insects. We can exterminate them.”
At home with her dog, Reem realized how lonely and weak she was without faith, without an illusion.
Paprika knew from the very first moment that Reem’s disease had no cure, save for another illusion. She needed faith to ground her. If this was the case, then the illusion should at least be beneficial to other people as well. Let Reem be a new messiah, let her sacrifice herself, that the son of man may live a new life.
Paprika gave Reem this new illusion, only to suck it dry for her own purposes. She needed one more life, in addition to the seventy-seven she already had, in order to summon the spirits and unseen forces necessary for the completion of her project. She needed a body, and a soul, to sacrifice.
This is how she would destroy Cairo.
Reem became a part of Paprika, and Paprika became all of Reem. All through the power of suggestion, mind control, and masturbation.
. . .
ONE OF THESE DAYS I SHAN’T AWAKE
Every city has a guardian. His job is not to protect anyone, but to hold the keys to the city’s secrets.
Every city has its secrets, some more than others. Every city has seven keys. Some say it’s no more than an urban legend, while others believe it’s true. As long as the guardians keep tight-lipped about their business, there’s really no way to be certain.6
The Doctor was the Guardian of Cairo. When I asked him if he had any secrets to share, he looked out over the Nile, cast a yellow grin, and said, “What do you expect me to say, you fool?”
“Maybe you know how to get through all this traffic, for example.”
He turned around to contemplate the cars passing over the bridge below. From where we were, it was easy to guess that there would be an endless line of cars stretching as far as the eye could see. In Cairo, stalled traffic and long waits were part of the normal pace of things.
“Unfortunately, I don’t know how to fly.”7
The Doctor requested to see all the films that I’d made for the Society,8 and asked about the particular areas of the city in which Paprika had shown interest. One of these could be seen right outside the window: the bridge along the Ring Road that connects to al-Warraq.
“We haven’t won this place over yet,” Ihab said. “But neither do we want to lose it.”9
From here the Nile flows out of Cairo. From what I could tell him about Paprika and Reem, the Doctor was trying to understand what the two were thinking. They talked about the need to change reality, the need to put an end to this tragedy. But what was the plan, exactly? What were they going to do?
He didn’t have to wait long to find out.
The dust storms began brewing the next day, and the chaos commenced. Ihab had been scheduled to depart for London, but the airport was closed due to the weather.
Soon, the bridge along the Ring Road collapsed—the very same bridge we had just been contemplating in an attempt to discern what was cooking in Paprika’s mind.
I stayed inside for two whole days in order to avoid the sands. I called Reem to determine when we should resume filming, but she didn’t pick up.
Then one day, at four in the morning, I got a short text from her that read, “One of these days I shan’t awake.”
I tried calling again, but her phone was out of service.
A story the Doctor told me made a lasting impression.
“Ever heard of Christopher Wren, my boy? He was a famous British architect, and a major figure in the Society. Behind the scenes, he helped pave the way for postmodernism. On the outside, he founded a school or institution of some sort to encourage nonmembers to pursue their quest for knowledge. But that’s not why I bring him up . . . By the way, what were we talking about?”
“You were talking about someone named Christopher Wren,” I suggested.
“Right. So, back in the seventeenth century or thereabouts, a tremendous fire broke out that destroyed half of London. Wren was one of the principal players—there were rumors, in fact, that he had started the fire. Afterward, he drew up new plans for the city that included broad avenues and parks that resembled those in other major European cities of the time. Wren was successful in implementing some of these, but his most important ideas did not come to fruition. For example, he had insisted on the use of limestone and cement in the construction of new buildings in order to prevent future fires; this was rejected by the city’s residents. He also had designs to redraw the city’s demographic map by eliminating the more traditional and impoverished neighborhoods; here, too, he was unsuccessful. Had his most basic ideas seen the light of day, London would have been transformed into a true city of the future.
“Drawing on his connections with a number of sister organizations—most importantly the Freemasons, who were then at the height of their power—Wren was able to convince the British government to adopt his plan. But the government wasn’t everything. Having entered into negotiations with a number of players, Wren was forced to make compromises and lower his expectations. The city’s major landowners decided, in the end, to rebuild their property as it had been, according to the general shape originally devised by the Romans in the first century. So Wren wasn’t able to make the city’s streets as logical and organized as they were in other European cities. He was, however, able to implement some of his ideas as they related to the city’s churches and cathedrals. You following me?”
“You bet.” I smiled, without knowing why. I could see the end approaching like a black hole swallowing everything up, starting with me.
Sometimes, to see the light at the end of the tunnel, you have to blast open a wall with dynamite.
We walked out to the Doctor’s Korean-made car, which was driven by his personal assistant, the wild rhinoceros. The Doctor continued: “Ihab’s philosophy is rather idealistic. He holds a great reverence for the past. He’d like to be able to walk forward as far as possible, and still be able to look back at his very first steps.”
He took the front seat, and I the back.
“No, my boy, I can’t fly. But I have confidence that, some day, we will be able to.” He reached over to turn on the radio, his voice fading amidst a crackle of frequencies.
Notes
1. Why did Arthur C. Clarke choose a name like this? He could have learned something from Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Pym’s name comes off the tongue like a stone gondola.
2. Contrast this to Poe’s novel, published in New York in 1838, in which no one is fearful of solitude. The novel’s protagonist stows away on a whaling boat for a long and, at first, seemingly normal journey. Soon, however, things take a turn for the worse, as the boat heads toward the South Pole. Sprung from his hiding place, Pym endures an endless series of life-threatening catastrophes: mutiny among the cabin crew, drownings and sinkings, murder, scalping, cannibalism, battles with primitive islanders.
3. In the language of the Incas, Machu Picchu means “the ancient summit.” It’s what they call the city of the sky, the lost capital of the Incas. Amazingly, it was one of the only things to survive everything that happened.
4. I sometimes like to imagine the moment of “enlightenment” that brought Ihab together with the young man from Chile. It must have been something similar to one of the many epiphanies experienced by the great founder of Saint-Simonianism, the spiritual father of all those demons and sons of the nineteenth century, the innovator of the Church of Industry. The dawning of Paprika, on the other hand, would be more akin to the rays of enlightenment that seized the movement’s later disciples. I recall in particular the meeting that took place in 1846 in a modest apartment on the Rue de la Victoire in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. The disciples had gathered to launch the Société d’Études du Canal de Suez with a fund of 150,000 francs. The minutes of the session are available in the public domain; there’s no need to go digging for them in the archive. The closing words of the “Enlightened One” still resonate: “Dear gentleman, the Suez Canal is no longer a philosophical theory or political issue. It is a commercial deal.” The train had left the station, though the tracks had yet to be laid.
5. The kappa is a creature known to the world of cryptozoology. In the Shinto religion of Japan, it’s considered a water deity. It is mostly represented in Japanese art as a childlike creature with the face of a monkey or frog. Unfortunately, most accounts of the kappa do not clearly distinguish between the fanciful imaginations of the Japanese artists and the actual processes of genetic engineering that may very well give rise to such creatures. The truth of their provenance is among those many secrets held exclusively by Paprika.
6. This system doesn’t apply to some of the older cities. Its origins can be traced to the nineteenth century and the spread of the Industrial Revolution—or what I prefer to call “The Brotherhood’s First Dawn.” Back then, those elements that refused to assimilate installed sentinels to keep one eye on the new world’s sundry transgressions and another eye on the hidden corridors of the past. The success of this policy can be credited in large part to the Algerian prince Abd al-Qadir, who introduced an advanced mechanized system of guardianship whose members were all descended from the race of al-Khidr (peace be upon him).
7. With the defeat of his forces at the Battle of the Smala, Abd al-Qadir was urged by his disciples to convince his French brethren to stop their barbaric war. A document preserved in the archive records the plea of one of his disciples to use more advanced weaponry, as well as the prince’s response: “Unfortunately, I don’t know how to fly.”
8. In 1842, the French army began its assault on the stronghold of Prince Abd al-Qadir. In Paris, members of the Brotherhood supported the campaign under the ostensible pretext of spreading modernity and combating barbarism. Their real aim, however, was to get Abd al-Qadir to join them, hoping he would give them access to his secret trove of ancient knowledge. If their efforts failed, they hoped at least to force him to surrender and give up his secrets under duress. The prince told them to stuff it. When the French stormed the capital at Tagdemt, they found it deserted. Abd al-Qadir had ordered all its weaponry, arms factories, goldsmiths, tanners, and paper mills removed. He then founded the Smala (or zamala; literally “fellowship”), the world’s first full-spectrum city of magic. The Smala, whose residents numbered some 70,000, could move around and disappear in the middle of the desert. At its center was “the Circle,” which contained the prince’s tents, his family, advisers, horses, and personal security detail, which consisted of thirty black slaves. At the periphery of the Circle stood his cavalry, whose distinctive costume consisted of a red jacket, blue pants, and two cloaks, one white and one gray. The Circle was surrounded by concentric rings, each containing up to thirty tents. The Circle also contained the prince’s library, as well as an eight-sided mosque designed by the prince himself in imitation of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. The Smala would settle down a reasonable distance from a particular town or city, and stay for as long as a week. When the prince got word of an advance by the French, the Smala would pick up its tents and disappear into the sands, before settling down elsewhere by dawn.
9. As a result of the tragedy endured by Abd al-Qadir and his Smala, the city guardians developed a capricious and unstable nature. They would move about according to an inscrutable monastic ethos, which made their movements seem rash and unpredictable.