Naguine

Robert Taylor was an old black man that I used to talk to when I did volunteer work at the VA hospital in Ann Arbor. He was retired from GMC Hydromatic in Ypsilanti, Michigan, but he had come up to Michigan from the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s. Because he was still relatively healthy, he enjoyed a certain status among the retired vets, who were mostly in poor health, and he flirted with the nurses, who were mostly female. He also played an old, beat-up acoustic guitar that couldn't keep a tune; the g-string always kept slipping out of tune. But we both played the guitar and liked the blues, so we had something in common.

Now, you probably think that this is one of those stories where an old bluesman teaches a young neophyte a thing or two about the blues, but the truth was that Mr. Taylor's style was very raw and very primitive, and his singing voice sounded like it was being filtred through a speaker that had been cut up with a razor blade. Or maybe it sounded like what a chicken breast would sound like being beaten by a butcher's block to stretch it out (that is, if the chicken were still alive). In other words, most people today probably would have thought that he neither sang nor played very well. However, rather than run out of the room, holding my ears, I politely waited until he was finished with his song, and then I showed him what I could do. He admitted afterwards, "I ain't got nuthin' on you, son!"

Then one day, he told me the story of his life:

I was standing at the crossroads, trying to flag a ride with my guitar in hand, when a band of gypsies rode by and said, "Hey, we're having a party tonight! Why don't you party with us?"

Now, I ain't never seen no band of gypsies before, and I's a little worried. I mean, they all looked like they was pirates or something, and I had never seen wagons like what they had. The wooden wheels of their wagons was carved up with all kinds of swirls and squiggles that I ain't never seen on no wagon before or since. But I was never one to pass up a chance to party, even with a band of gypsies, so I takes their ride and they takes me back to their camp.

Now, they music ain't nothing like I has ever heard before. Today, I would say it sound like Spanish flamingo music. When a Mexican guy at work played his guitar many years later, he got insulted when I aksed if he was a gypsy, but they music sounded like Spanish flamingo too. But the songs that they sung ain't in no American that I has ever heard sung before. They probably ain't in no Spanish neither. I thought maybe it 'cause they drunk or something, 'cause we was drunk by the end of the evening.

Then, after midnight, a gypsy girl offered herself to me. Even though I drunk, she so pretty I couldn't say no. She spent the night with me by the light of the gypsy campfire, and when we was done doing our thing, we falled asleep in each other's arms, almost like we married or something. But when I wakes up the next morning, I finds myself holding a guitar! I couldn't believe it! It wasn't my guitar, so I thinks the gypsy girl musta turned herself into a guitar while I's asleep.

Since I woked up before the gypsies, I switched guitars. I left the gypsies' camp with the guitar I found in my arms that morning and left them my guitar. I thought it was a good deal, but my life ain't been the same since.

The night after I left the gypsies, my guitar turn into a woman at midnight. I couldn't believe it! But this time, I wasn't drunk like the night before. As a matter of fact, I had nothing to drink, but they she was, standing in front of me wiffout no clothes on!

Now you might think that us black folks is black, but this girl's skin was almost as black as mine, and her long dark hair was as black as the muddy Mississippi, overflowing down her back like Old Man River himself when he floods. I loves her hair! And her eyes, they almost as black as two coals. Except when she angry, then they red. If you woulda seen me walking up and down Main Street of my town whiff her, you'd a thunk we a black couple. I didn't have to worry 'bout no white folks lynching me, but she sho' talk funny! When I aks her to cook me breakfast in the morning, she say to me, "You must be avare that I turn back into guitar vhen the sun come up. I can't cook you no breakfast."

Not that we call each other by name too much, at least in the beginning, but when I aks her for her name, she tell me, "My name is Naguine."

Never heard no name like Naguine before. Must be a gypsy name.

Eventually, one thing lead to another. That's to say, Naguine was eventually in the family way. After that, she didn't turn into no guitar at dawn no more but stayed a woman. That meant she could cook me breakfast in the morning if she want, but the first time she cook me breakfast, I think she trying to poison me. Gypsy food ain't nothing like what black folks eat! It also mean she could give me some loving any time of the day, but after a few months of being pregnant, she didn't want to give me no loving no more. "You have two good hands," she say. "Or you can go find somebody else."

Now a man ain't supposed to hit a lady, 'specially when she pregnant, but they was times when I wants to hit her upside the head. But Naguine ain't no ordinary woman. She worshipped some kind of devil. Way as black folks mostly believe in the Lord and accept Jesus Christ as their saviour, Naguine prayed to a statue of some woman with six arms. But only when she thought I's asleep. And she could turn herself into a snake. Sometimes, she even bit me too.

I must admit, they was a time or two when I tries to kill her. Both times, she turn to a snake and bit me. One time, I tore up the whole house trying to chop her up with a hatchet. The furniture was all kindling, and the dishes was all broke up on the floor. They was pans everywhere too, because I's throwing them at her. The babies was all scared too, crying, "Turn back, mama! Turn back! Turn back before daddy kill you!"

Then I has her cornered, and I shout, "I gots you now, you snake woman!"

But then she turn to a woman again and says, all dignified: "I could turn into a venomous snake, you know. Be thankful I didn't have venom."

After that, Naguine didn't turn herself into a snake no more, except when she felt like eating a mouse. She used to eat some strange things! She could turn into other animals, too. One time, she turn into a giant bull fog and swallowed a sparrow whole down by the creek. I couldn't believe it! Another time, she turn into a pelican. She also turn into a manitee when we was living in Florida, but she got run over by somebody in a boat and had a bad scar on her leg.

Then I gets to thinking, What if she wants to turn into an alligator and eat me? When you'se living with a witchy woman, you never know. She have mood swings, you know, so she couldn't always help herself.

But she always gave me good loving. That's why we have lots of babies. Most of our babies was like me, unable to change themselves into snakes and frogs, but we has one daughter that can walk on water. Among her peoples, only womans can walk on water but not mans. I seen a couple of her sisters walking across the bayous or across the Florida Everglades at night or early in the morning round dawn. With lanterns in they hands, they look just like what the Cajuns call "foo foolettes," or "will-o-the-wisps," from a distance. It's a pretty sight, but they was strange peoples! They come to visit us 'cause they's always travelling, way as we stay put in one place, 'cept when I gots to go look for a job. We could never visit them 'cause they's always moving. They's thiefs and fortune tellers, you know, only one step head of the law.

Then, one day after the War, Naguine says to me, "I have heard from my family that the automobile plants in Detroit are hiring. Maybe you should see about finding a job in Detroit."

That was Naguine's way of telling me to get a job. Seeing that I's a veteran just come back from the War, they's no work for black folks like me down South, 'cept picking cotton or grinding sugar cane, so I followed the Mississippi River up north. They's hiring in Detroit, but they only want me as a janitor 'cause I's black. I wants to work on the assembly line or run a machine, but I's willing to take any job I could get. I spend forty-four years working at Hydromatic, from 1946 to 1990. Eventually, I becomes a machinist 'cause I wents to school and learns everything I could 'bout running machines. I retired as a tool and dye maker. Though I talks like a black man from down South, I don't read and write like one. I read newspapers every day.

Two or three years after I got hired, I bought a house on Grove Avenue in Ypsilanti, where all the black folks live, and Naguine came up from Florida with the kids. In 1970, we sold the house on Grove and bought another one on Warner Avenue in Ypsilanti Township in what was a mixed neighbourhood. After that, Naguine start going to the church at the corner of Wallace Boulevard and Michigan Avenue and got saved. She stop turning herself into animals after that and live the life of a good Christian woman, at least as far as I know.

Then, after I retire, she got cancer and die. My daughter a nurse, so Naguine die at home in a hospital bed in the living room. And what do you think happen when Naguine die? She turn back into a guitar right before everybody's eyes! But when I tries to play her, I finds I can't play a lick. It be so many years since I play my guitar that I forgets everything I knowed before I got married. This guitar that I play, this be Naguine. I starting to get back what I knowed before, but I sho' ain't no Elmo James…


Now, I wasn't going to tell an old man that his guitar couldn't possibly have been a real live woman, because I have always believed in being respectful towards the elderly, so I decided to just humour him. Besides, it was a good story, and I was able to kill some time just listening to him.

Then, as I was about to leave to go back to work, Mr. Taylor had some visitors. About ten or twenty people who looked like Roma crowded into his little private room, speaking all at once in a language that I had never heard before. They sounded like they were from India, except that they were dressed like gypsies, with the men in white puffed sleeve shirts and the women in long and billowy multi-coloured skirts. Most of them were as dusky as the silt that formed the Mississippi Delta, with black hair and ebony eyes to match, though some of the children had light brown hair and lighter skin. Most of them had rotten teeth, however, though one of the younger woman, a very beautiful young woman, had shiny white teeth to rival the pearly Gates of Heaven.

One of the men took Mr. Taylor's guitar and started playing what sounded like Spanish flamenco music while some of the women danced and beat their tambourines. I couldn't believe it! I wondered if there wasn't some veracity to the fantastic story that Mr. Taylor had told me, but then I shook my head and said to myself, "Nah, can't be! People can't change their shape at will." Or can they?

Mr. Taylor and his gypsy relations had to take their party outside, because some of the other clients at the retirement home complained about the noise. They partied from the afternoon until about eight o'clock at night, when visiting hours were over.

After that, I looked at Mr. Taylor's badly out-of-tune guitar in a different light.

Lalla Ghazal

When I met Lalla Ghazal, she was a belly dancer in Cairo, and a very successful one, making money like water. She was also a recording artist with some success throughout the Arab world; people even bought her CDs. Though Lalla Ghazal was sunburnt like the women of Egypt, with kohl-lined black-brown eyes and long, ashen hair that flowed like the Nile down her back, she was, in fact a French-Canadian who had converted to Islam while living in Morocco with her boyfriend. Therefore, she spoke and sang with a Moroccan accent, because she had lived in Morocco long enough to learn to speak Arabic. But it wasn't Lalla Ghazal's accent that enchanted me so much as her soft and low voice, as well as her ebony eyes lined with kohl, dimpled cheeks, and smile with white teeth. As well, I liked her glasses with the small black frames; they made her look smart, intellectual.

Of course, Lalla Ghazal's dance style wasn't pure shaqs raqi, the style of the Egyptian countryside, but what was considered a "gypsy" style. She could pirouette in high heels like a ballerina and kick her long legs high in the air like a Rockette. In her native Montreal, she admitted later, her experience had been limited to dancing around the pole at centre stage in gentlemen's clubs, but she had a natural aptitude for dance; there was no style of dance that she couldn't master from the time that she first took ballet lessons as a little girl, she believed. As well, she had a stage presence and a natural charisma off stage; that was why I fell in love with her.

When I saw her sit down to talk with a gentleman at a table in the front row at the night club, I couldn't resist the urge to go up and try to talk to her. I had to do it! When Lalla Ghazal first saw me approach from the corner of her eye, she stopped talking with the gentleman that she was talking to for a moment to acknowledge me, and then continued talking to the gentleman. However, she looked up at me again, smiled, and then bade the other gentleman salaam aleikum. She stood up, exchanged kisses on the cheek with the gentleman, and then turned her attention to me. "Salaam aleikum," the dancer said, smiling again. "You are?..."

She extended her hand as I stammered, "Dawud, Dawud al-Khuriyati."

It was by talking with her that I noticed her foreign accent. However, she told me that she was originally from Canada, from Montreal, not Morocco. "My boyfriend, John, and I converted to Islam while we were in living in Marrakech," she said, "but he's living in Canada with our daughter now. I doubt that he's a practising Muslim now..."

I found her to be very open, very frank, about her sexuality. Though she would have hotly denied that she was morally loose, she admitted later that she had been a prostitute in the past, and that her daughter was born out of wedlock. She believed that she understood the Middle East, she said. She understood that people in the Arab world considered dancers like her to be whores, prostitutes, but she said that she didn't care what people thought.

When she saw me looking at all the jewelry hanging from her costume, rings and pearls, diamonds and rubies, silver and gold, as well as the sequins hanging down from her top, she smiled at me and said in her soft, mezzo soprano voice: "These are all from men who would have liked to have been my lover. I adore sex, monsieur! However, it should be the expression of love and intimacy between two people who love each other. It's also how we bring babies into the world…"

Lalla Ghazal talked with me until it was time for her to go back on stage for the second half of her performance. When we stood up, we embraced and kissed each other on the cheeks. Before we let go of each other, however, she touched the tip of her tongue to the back of my neck. Then she smiled at me slyly and said, "I like your taste, monsieur…"

I would always remember her smile, I thought to myself. I would always remember her glasses, which she wore even on stage. I would always remember the dimples and her squared Gallic jaw that positively identified her as French. Her beauty was like that of Catherine Deneuve, the French actress of the 1970s, or Nefertiti, the ancient Egyptian queen. She was from that race of beautiful women that have walked the earth since the dawn of civilization, women who all probably have the same genome as Nefertiti.

However, it was some months before Lalla Ghazal and I became lovers. Like others before me, I tried to woo her with gifts: rings and pearls, diamonds and rubies, gold and silver. While she dutifully wore whatever I gave her on her body or on her costume whenever she performed, she wasn't willing to pay for these gifts with her body. However, she remained friendly, and we often talked between sets whenever she performed. "I want love and respect, monsieur," she warned me. "I am not for sale and I am not a prostitute…"

Later, when I asked her about the silver cross around her neck, one that had two horizontal bars instead of one, she said, "It's the Cross of Lorraine. This one was made in France about 1750. I got it from my boyfriend, the man that wanted to marry me. I could never give it up because he received it from his mother after she died. Because it belonged to his mother, it's sacred to me, though I'm a Muslim rather than a Christian."

After that, I gave up trying to lure her with jewelry. Each night, she wore a small fortune in jewelry on her costume, so what was another diamond ring or a pearl necklace to her? However, I did buy her a sapphire ring for her birthday, which was the 25th of September.

Then, she said, at a later date, in an offhand remark, that she had had problems with cocaine in the past. "I loved cocaine!" she exclaimed, rapturously. "There was a time when I would have done anything for it. Yes, I even dated a certain gentleman for cocaine. Therefore, I'm an addict. All things are good, monsieur, but not all things are good for me. However, there are still times when I think that sobriety is overrated…"

That was the angle that I was looking for. It was with cocaine that I lured her into my hotel room. The moment that I whispered into her ear that I had a few grams, her eyes lit up; she was immediately intrigued. Then I saw the look of dread on her face as her resistance rapidly crumbled, like she knew that she was standing at an abyss, like she was contemplating a pact with the devil. However, something told me that she was also ready to take the plunge. Since I had some on me, I whispered into her ear, "Let's go up to my room and party, my gazelle…"

This was the siren whisper that lured her up to my room: cocaine. For six glorious months— no, one year — she was mine. In bed, she blew hot and fiery like a fierce desert sirocco. Once she was under the influence of the demon white powder, there was nothing that she wouldn't do for it. No act was too disgusting or too degrading; nothing was beneath her. And when she cried out loud in ecstasy for the first time with me, clawing her breasts with her fingernails while on top of me, I understood why people in rural Egypt still practiced female circumcision: to prevent the sexual vagabondage of women like her.

Most definitely, my beautiful Lalla Ghazal was as experienced in her craft as any other woman of the night. Without a doubt, she was among the most damned of the damned, despite her beauty and elegance, because there was nothing that she wouldn't or couldn't do in bed. But alas, it wasn't me who was her master, but the cocaine: she was doing it for the cocaine.

However, I did try to help her musical career. Though she was a star of sorts, she was in need of constant reassurance. I constantly had to tell her that she was beautiful and that she was very talented. My compliments were sincere. Though I am only an amateur lute player, I accompanied her on my lute on a few of songs that we recorded up in our hotel room of a four-track tape machine. One of them, "Sabra," even became a minor hit in Egypt.

In this song, a woman called Sabra (which means "desert flower" in Arabic) is tempted by the devil to betray her betrothed, Jibral, just before their wedding night. However, Jibral stops them just in time and then forgives Sabra for her infidelity.

When I asked her how she came up with the idea for a song like that, she merely shrugged her shoulders and replied, "It's based on a campfire story that I heard as a child in Canada."

Though she spoke fluent Arabic, though she considered herself a Muslim, her native country was something that she always carried with her in her heart.

Let me say that it wasn't all sex and passion between us. Many times, we went on picnics in the Valley of the Pyramids. As well, we spent many nights walking hand in hand along the Nile. I think that she felt the same sense of magic and mystery that I felt when she looked out at this very artery that has made Egyptian civilization possible up to this very day.

However, we eventually began to fight. For instance, I was deeply offended when she suddenly jumped out of bed in the morning at the sound of the muezzin calling everybody to prayer to do her ablutions in the nude. I may not be a good Muslim, but it hardly seemed fitting for a woman to stand, bow, and prostrate herself while facing Mecca dressed like Eve. For one thing, she hardly had the innocence of Eve, being a dancer all her life. Though she called herself a Muslim, she was from that class of fallen women who entertained men on earth rather than a houri who fed men grapes (and their bodies) in paradise. However much she thought that she loved me, she was a prostitute; she was impure, fitna.

One thing that Lalla Ghazal didn't seem to understand about Islam, at least at the time, is that a man and woman must be clean before they present themselves to God for prayer. Before the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer early in the morning, believers must bathe and perform certain purification rituals if they have had sex the night before. As well, they should never make love with their heads facing Mecca, and it is better that they separate afterwards rather than sleep together. Love and intimacy between a man and a woman can distract them in their relationship with God.

Lalla Ghazal gave in to me that time. That's to say, she apologized and made sure that she was decent the next time that she heard the call of the muezzin in the morning, but it was the first of many fights.

We fought because of the cocaine. Over many months, I spent thousands of piasters trying to feed Lalla Ghazal's cravings and my own. Since I was a civil servant with the Ministry of Antiquities making good money, nearly always in line for a promotion, I thought that I could afford it, but the consequences were nearly catastrophic sometimes. There was the constant paranoia. Several times, Lalla Ghazal was convinced that there were Muslim clerics hiding in our room, or that the police were about to arrest us at any moment for possession of the powder that she loved so well. She once seized a knife brought up by room service and thrust it into the elastic band of her sheer dancing skirt because she thought that she heard a mob of angry Muslims marching down the street to stone us for adultery. It goes without saying that Lalla Ghazal liked to play with knives. On more than a few occasions, she threatened me and even tried to kill me once, only I was always able to disarm her.

Of course, I became addicted, too. That's to say, I started to behave strangely as well as Lalla Ghazal. In my drug-induced paranoia, I sometimes suspected her of cheating on me and became violent. On more than one occasion, I struck her, suspecting that she was hiding a lover in our hotel room. Once, after I searched everywhere, in the closets and in the shower stall and still couldn't find him, I tried to beat it out of her. That was when she picked up the knife and tried to stab me with it. Once I disarmed her, however, we made wild and passionate love underneath the mirror on the ceiling in the bedroom, even though her shoulder was badly dislocated. But the sex was always better under the influence of cocaine: it was our magic love dust.

Maybe it isn't strange to say that we got married. We spent the last few months of our relationship with my parents in an older section of Cairo, near Al-Zukariyah Street. Though Lalla Ghazal had spent some months in a harem in Morocco as a guest of a family there, she did not take to life in a harem in Cairo at all. The reason was quite simple: once she moved in with my family, she became the lowest-ranking female in the household, behind my mother, my father's two sisters, and each of my three sisters. She resented the fact that I had to kiss my mother goodbye first when I went to work, then my aunts and my sisters, and her last. She was hurt when I had to buy presents for all the women in the household on her birthday, and the red silk scarf that she wanted so much ended up going to my aunt Sayida. What's more, she believed, not without justification, that my mother deliberately tried to keep us apart as often as possible. My mother would have even liked for me to take a second wife, if it was within my means, in order to prevent any intimacy between me and Lalla Ghazal.

Relations between a man and his wife, in my mother's mind, were solely for reproduction, not an expression of love or intimacy like Lalla Ghazal had thought. Though I could only go upstairs to see my wife with my father's permission, in reality, that permission passed down to my mother. Sometimes, she wouldn't let me see my wife at all. "A wife is fitna, Dawud," my mother said to me. "She's a temptation, a distraction from your duties to God and to other believers."

Lalla Ghazal and I lived separate lives after we were married. Men and women in Egypt seldom even go out together. Every Friday, when I went to mosque with my father and my brothers, Lalla Ghazal desperately wanted to go out with me at first, but the women on Al-Zukariyah Street understood that they were expected to stay home even from the mosque, except on certain days of the year, like the eids at the end of Ramadan, and other feast days.

When women do go to mosque, it is usually with other women. That's because the umma, the community of believers, is really a community of men; the women have traditionally just stayed home, though more women in Egypt go to mosque now and even have prayer groups led by women.

Lalla Ghazal could never accept the fact that the most important woman in an Arab man's life was his mother, not his wife. That's because you only have one mother, while a Muslim man, according to the Qur'an, can have up to four wives at a time, and marry and divorce as often as he pleases (though the wise man has only one wife and refrains from divorce, except when it can't be avoided).

Eventually, Lalla Ghazal and my mother quarrelled openly. It is customary that none of the women leave the room at a family gathering until the oldest woman there is ready to leave. Because Lalla Ghazal was pregnant, but not yet visibly so, she retired to her room early because she wasn't feeling well, without asking permission from my mother or my father. We couldn’t believe it, because the whole family had gathered in the living room to listen to the great Um Khalthum perform on the radio, as was customary on Thursday nights in Cairo back then, when she was still alive. We all felt insulted.

The next morning, my mother demanded an apology. When Lalla Ghazal explained that she only left because she wasn't feeling well, not out of any disrespect, my mother refused to accept her apology. Then my mother thrust out her hand and ordered her to kiss it in front of all the other women, both front and back. When Lalla Ghazal refused, it was open warfare between them. Up until then, Lalla Ghazal had grudgingly kissed my mother's hand twice a day, on the front and back, once in the morning and once at night, like all the other women of the household, but now she wouldn't kiss my mother's hand at all.

Just to give you an idea of just how much power my mother had, it was up to my mother to decide how much everybody ate every day. Of course, the men got bigger portions of meat than the women, with the oldest male (my father) getting first choice and so on down the line. Among the women, the oldest female of the household (my mother) decided how much each woman and each child got to eat. In my father's household, Lalla Ghazal was the last to be considered. Once Lalla Ghazal and my mother were quarrelling, Lalla Ghazal barely received enough food to sustain her, even though it eventually became evident that she was pregnant. My mother might have dreaded being accused of starving a pregnant woman to death, but she probably wouldn't have minded if Lalla Ghazal had lost the baby. Therefore, she allotted to Lalla Ghazal what she thought was the bare minimum necessary to sustain her.

Most of the females in the household tried to stay out of the quarrel between Lalla Ghazal and my mother. My youngest sister, Amina, out of a sense of compassion, secretly saved some of her food to give to my wife, who was most grateful. However, Amina refused to oppose our mother openly, and my aunt Sayida, my father's oldest sister, took special delight in tormenting Lalla Ghazal. (Both of my aunts, Sayida and Malika, lived with my father because they were divorced.) Two or three times, Sayida spat in Lalla Ghazal's food in front of all the women before she served it to her. Lalla Ghazal refused to eat it the first couple of times, but after the third time, she pretended not to notice and ate what was given to her. That was when Amina started saving some of her food for Lalla Ghazal.

Please bear in mind: I never saw any of this myself, because the men and the women did nearly everything separately in our household, including eating separately. However, I had some understanding of what went on. Word got around even in our household, so I can't say that I didn't know. My father knew as well, but he left all matters concerning the women to my mother. "Your mother is the Grand-Vizier," he used to say. "I am merely the Sultan."

Though Lalla Ghazal loved cocaine more than life itself, she resolutely gave it up once she was aware that she was pregnant. Besides, she had few opportunities to indulge her passion anyway, once she was living in my father's house. However, I could not say the same thing about myself. As Lalla Ghazal grew heavy with child, I stewed my liver with alcohol and fed my nose with cocaine night after night. On a meagre civil servant's salary, I thought that I could afford it. The fact that I kept getting promotions only seemed to confirm my belief that I had my habit under control, but I soon went deeply into debt. I would come close to losing my job with the Ministry of Antiquities, which would have been a terrible disgrace before the entire family.

Then one morning, my older brother Ramzi woke me up out of a terrible hangover to hand me a letter; it was from Lalla Ghazal. It read:

"My dear former husband, by the time you read this letter, I will be out of the country, I promise you. That's because you beat me after you came home drunk last night. I spent much of last night in emergency because you gave me a concussion and caused me to lose the baby. That's right, I lost the baby. Between you beating me and your mother trying to starve me, what chance did the baby really have? You should try spending time in a Third World emergency room; it isn't a lot of fun. They were treating a man who had to have a tapeworm removed, but he was given priority over me. They only treated me at all because your brother pretended to be my husband and gave the doctor permission to treat me. In the West, it is considered natural for men to leave their mothers and cling to their wives, but you love your mother more than you love me. So cling to your mother then. Allah akbar. God is great. Lalla Ghazal."

However, I could remember nothing of the night before. It was as if the part of that day between dusk and dawn never existed. Then I looked at the four photographs underneath the letter. They were all photos of Lalla Ghazal with bruises on her face that hadn't been there before I went out that night and got drunk. The photo that still remains in my mind is the one of Lalla Ghazal with the white of her left eye all red from the broken capillaries, and the bruise under her eye. That image will be with me always, even when I appear before God on the Day of Judgment. While the Qur'an permits a man to chastise his wife with force, if necessary, he may not beat her in a drunken rage.

"I couldn't have done that!" I sobbed after I saw the photos. "I love her!"

Ramzi looked at me gravely and said, "For a brief moment, Dawud, you hated her, and that moment was all it took."

Even though I doubted that I would ever find her, I searched every hospital in Cairo, but to no avail. Then I searched the night clubs of Cairo, also to no avail. Eventually, I had to conclude that Lalla Ghazal had left the country for good. She had either returned to Canada, I thought, or she was dancing somewhere else in the Middle East, like in Morocco or somewhere on the Persian Gulf. Very likely, she no longer called herself Lalla Ghazal but went by her old name, which I didn't know, so that I couldn't find her. Quite possibly, she had even renounced Islam in her heart because of me.

Belly dancers can make lots of money doing bachelor parties, you know, particularly in the oil sheikdoms. Lalla Ghazal once confided in me that she often made as much as a hundred thousand dollars U.S. at bachelor parties. She also danced at hen parties for women about to be married, but she never made as much money and the women always expected a better performance. She seldom danced before both sexes, she said, because on the rare occasions where the sexes mingled, the dancers were usually transvestites. "Male dancers are almost always gay," she said to me knowingly.

Eventually, I had to divorce her when it became evident that she wasn't coming back. Then I received a letter from her some months later, postmarked Istanbul. "I'm doing well, thank you," it read. "But don't try to write back. I will be in Beirut or Sidon by the time you read this. Then I am returning to Canada to be with my daughter and her father. Allah akbar. God is great. Lalla Ghazal."

Then she added in a post script, "Everything happens for a reason, I suppose."

When I showed the post card to my mother, she merely said, "You're better off without her, Dawud. She was fitna, a distraction."

Maybe my mother was right.

Yuri

Reiko had had severe psychiatric problems for the last twenty years of her life before she committed suicide at the age of fifty-four, having been in and out of hospitals during that time. She ran a hot bath, slashed open her wrists, and bled to death.

Since she started having these problems around the time that Japan went into its economic tailspin at the start of the 1990s, people assumed that she was anxious about the uncertainty that the difficult times entailed for middle-class people like her and her husband and daughter; you just couldn't be certain about anything anymore.

However, the causes of Reiko's malaise were far more private. Twenty-years before her death, her twelve-year-old daughter, Sachiko, brought home a friend from school named Midori. There was something about this girl that impressed Reiko very much. She was very tall, probably five centimetres taller than her daughter. Unlike her daughter, who was very pretty, Midori was only average in appearance, but this girl had not internalized the shyness and anxiety that adolescent girls in Japan around her age already started to internalize. Rather, she seemed centred, self-confident, even brazenly self-confident. She smiled often and spoke in a calm, low voice, often making eye-contact rather than bowing her head low when in the presence of authority figures.

When Sachiko introduced Midori to her mother, Midori made the ceremonious bow fitting to the social rank of someone like Reiko, but Midori gazed into Reiko's eyes afterwards and held her gaze for what seemed like several seconds. Then Midori smiled a secret little smile and bowed again. Reiko found it very disconcerting.

Sachiko and Midori went into the living room of the small apartments to do some studying while Reiko went back to preparing dinner. About twenty minutes later, Sachiko came back into the kitchen with Midori to ask if her friend could stay for dinner.

Reiko felt somewhat put out with the prospects of having to cook for another person, but she decided to let Midori stay for dinner, since it was likely that her husband wouldn't be home for dinner anyway.

It seemed that her husband was never home for dinner anymore. The last time that Sachiko had seen her father, a few weeks earlier, Reiko had to arrange an appointment with her husband's secretary beforehand.

While making dinner, Reiko began to muse about her daughter's friend. She visualized herself at a hidden cove somewhere by the ocean as she heard Midori call her name.

Then, as she stood before the kitchen sink to wash off a long knife in some soapy water, she felt somebody put her arms around her from behind. The girl kissed her gently on the cheek, and then she rested her head head on her shoulder and sighed with contentment.

Reiko was surprised by this display of affection. Thinking that it was her daughter standing behind her, Reiko dropped the knife into the sink, turned around, and saw Midori instead. She couldn't believe it!

Reiko was about to speak when Midori silenced her with a kiss. For some minutes, or so it seemed, the girl aggressively probed her mouth with her lips and mouth before thrusting her tongue into her mouth.

It seemed that Reiko was about to give into the girl's advances when she felt a hand on her breast. That was when Reiko seized control of the situation and ordered the girl to stop. Silently, the girl obeyed. Midori merely bowed her head without shame and went back to the living room. However, Midori stopped at the entrance to the living room and turned around and smiled knowingly at Reiko before entering the living room.

For some minutes, Reiko stood at the centre of the kitchen, visibly shaken, trying to collect herself. Then, as if still in a daze, she went to the kitchen sink and thrust her arm into the water. The water in the sink immediately turned a blood red as her arm jumped out of the water as if of it's own accord.

As Reiko held her arm, she had what the Zen Buddhists call a sartori experience; she felt completely outside of herself. It was like it wasn't her holding onto her arm at all but somebody else. Only when she realized that she was bleeding profusely did she call for help.

Both Sachiko and Midori came running into the kitchen, where they saw Reiko holding her arm, unable to stop the bleeding. When it was apparent that Sachiko didn't know what to do, Reiko shouted at her to call for an ambulance. While Sachiko telephoned for the ambulance, Midori tightly wrapped a dish towel tightly around Reiko's lower arm as a tourniquet, before calmly telling the woman to lie down on the kitchen floor.

When Sachiko came back into the kitchen, Midori told her to get a pillow from the sofa in the living room for Reiko's head while she applied a wet dish rag as a compress to Reiko's forehead, which was now clammy from shock.

The ambulance crew found Reiko lying on the kitchen floor with Midori alternatingly stroking her hand or her forehead to keep her calm while Sachiko sobbed uncontrollably.

Of course, Reiko survived that suicide attempt (if suicide had subconsciously been her intention), but there were other attempts at suicide before she eventually succeeded.

Through all of this, her husband was usually as remote as the Japanese emperor: seldom seen, though his existence was dutifully acknowledged and respected. He was always spoken of in reverent tones, almost like he was divine, though he was away on a business trip to South America when Reiko successfully committed suicide.

They found Reiko's body in the bathtub, blue and discoloured, having been lifeless for some days. The water looked like a sheet of red ice, with blood spattered on the tiled walls of the bathtub enclosure behind her.

They say that people who die like Reiko experience a relatively painless death, once the endorphins start to kick in, but the police and crew from the mortuary couldn't have told from her features because she had been dead for too long. It was one of those suicides where a neighbour calls the police when he or she smells something rotten coming from underneath the door to the apartment.

They Call Him Flipper

What's large and shiny and flies through the air with a thousand flash bulbs going off at the same time? A bus full of Japanese tourists falling over a cliff. Since I'm a dolphin, about thirteen years old, I don't feel the constraints of political correctness that the average North American male Caucasian human might feel. I admit that I don't like the Japanese very much, but any animosity that I might feel towards them says more about me than it does about the Japanese. Let it suffice to say that, in a country that gave the world karaoke and Nintendo, people who have to herd dolphins into nets and then club them to death to make a living must not be very bright. Of course, my views are biased, based on a rather unusual set of experiences, but experience has taught me that the Japanese can be very rude rather than polite when it comes to dolphins. Like most people who hate (if I hate anyone, of course), it's because I have perceived that they hated me first.

The fishermen of the Japanese village of Genji have reason to think that dolphins aren't very intelligent. Year after year, they create a panic among us dolphins by creating a sonic boom through sonar devices planted underwater— and we dolphins fall for it every time. You would think that we'd have figured out by now that it's just some Japanese fishermen trying to herd us into their nets so that they can club as to death and make mercury-tainted fillets of us that they will then sell in their fish markets, but no, we obviously haven't caught on. Every year, scores of us are caught in their nets and drowned because we swim right into their nets in a panic. The surviving adults are then clubbed to death while the children and adolescents are sold at auction to aquariums around the world.

Of course, some dolphins escape the nets entirely, but then they repeat the same mistake of being duped by loud noises in subsequent years. If history teaches us anything, it's that we don't learn from history. That could be why the Japanese don't even dignify us by thinking of us as fellow mammals. To the Japanese, the dolphin is just a big fish while the whale is a "monster fish." Really.

I will try not to bore you with too many details about the life of dolphins. I am a member of the species lagenorhyncus obliquidens, or "white-sided dolphin," an adult male, approximately thirteen years old. Whereas the better known bottle-nosed dolphin may hang out in groups of only ten or so members, L. obliquidens may travel with thousands of other members of the same species. That's why the Japanese consider us to be such pests: we eat more food as an aggregate than the bottle-nosed dolphin. We subsist on a diet of squid, crustaceans, and fish— something that the Japanese also subsist on. If it swims, chances are that the white-sided dolphin will eat it, which is why dolphins are in competition with the Japanese fishermen for food; the Japanese will eat anything that swims, too, including the poisonous puffer fish. (We dolphins don't eat the puffer fish, however. We have enough trouble surviving without the puffer fish making things more difficult for us.)

Like nearly every species of flora and fauna that live underwater, the white-sided dolphin can't see very well in its native environment; L. obliquidens would be as blind as a bat, if bats could swim. However, Evolution, Intelligent Design, or whatever you want to call it, has provided dolphins with a form of sonar called echolocation that humans were not able to replicate until the middle of the twentieth century with the invention of sonar. The way sound travels under water, echolocation does have its advantages. One well-timed shriek can lead a group of dolphins to an all-you-eat feast of thousands of fish or shrimp hundreds of kilometres away. An adult dolphin like myself needs to eat at least one-third of his weight in fruits de la mer every day in order to survive, but thanks to echolocation and the sheer abundance of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks in the oceans, it isn't very difficult for the average dolphin to meet his daily minimum nutritional requirements.

However, nothing fails like success. Once members of homo sapiens discovered the scientific principles behind sonar, they began to use our weapon against us. As I have already told you, Japanese fishermen plant sonar devices underwater that emit loud shrieks that would startle the you-know-what out of anything that has ears in order to stampede us. All they have to do after that is lay their nets down and wait in ambush with their clubs. It doesn't take much intelligence to do that. And bear in mind: sound travels much farther and much faster under water than it does over land. The fisherman with an intelligence quotient in two digits might consider him intellectually superior to the unsuspecting L. obliquidens scared feces-less by a sudden burst of ungodly sound, but even Albert Einstein would have jumped if a firecracker was suddenly hurled at his feet. Sound does that to people, you know.

I have always been reluctant to talk about how I ended up on public display in a glass fish tank because, frankly, it still hurts to talk about it. One minute, you're swimming with your friends off the coast of Japan, and the next thing you know, some very nasty Japanese guys with some very nasty clubs are trying to club you to death for no apparent reason. You might think I'm joking, but I'm not. I lost some friends that day— lots of friends. Most of them drowned in the nets, though, because we were just adolescents and it was the adults that they wanted to kill. They only wanted to sell the juveniles to aquariums like SeaWorld for profit, and for the amusement of human families, not kill us. I suppose you could say that we were sold into slavery, since we dolphins didn't make any money in the deal.

I'm like the soldier who has experienced combat. Sometimes, usually at night when I'm asleep, I can still hear the screams of my comrades. There's blood mingled with saltwater everywhere; you even see blood, guts, and gore on the rocks and on the beaches. Those who swim away wounded often escape only to be eaten by sharks. It's pitiful to hear some hulking youth scream for his mother as he dies a slow and agonizing death, or somebody crying out the name of some girlfriend that he will never see again as he slips permanently into the ether. And then there are those who call out for some god to end it all, only God, Providence, or whatever you want to call it, never seems to end it quite soon enough. Even the most merciful of deities are slow to act in situations such as I have faced with my friends.

So there I am, lying on the beach, waiting to be clubbed. Like a baby harp seal, I flash those baby blues at some middle-aged Japanese guy with a conical hat and seaweed for a raincoat, holding a humongous club, and plea, "Please don't kill me! But if you have to do it, make it quick."

The guy looks into my eyes and he stops to think about it. We connect. Maybe he realizes that I'm like him. Maybe he realizes that there's something in me that's human, or something in him that's dolphin. Maybe he even thinks that dolphins have souls.

Then he looks over to another guy who has a club and says, "Not this one; we call sell him to an aquarium."

Through some final selection process, I ended up at SeaWorld. But that was then— this is now. Every morning at approximately the same time, a buck-toothed Japanese man dressed in a white uniform stained from sweat and fish entrails throws buckets of smelt to the dolphins in the tank. It's always the same species of fish, and the fish are always dead, but who is a captive dolphin to complain, right? Only you eat your morning repast with little enthusiasm, particularly if you still remember the taste of live giant squid. But what's really humiliating is that the guy in institutional white sometimes expects you to dance on your tail and try to clap your fins together just for one fish while your friends are snickering in the background. And then, when it's their turn, you do the same thing: you try to suppress a laugh as one of them begs for a fish. Mostly, it's very boring, really. Sometimes, you don't care if you get a fish.

So what do we do to pass the time? We get high. Trust me: there are things that dolphins know about pharmacology about which humans know nothing. Even at SeaWorld, they unknowingly put plants in the tank that will do the trick. When you see a dolphin lying on his side about to roll over on his blowhole after a performance, psychologists think that it's because the dolphin is clinically depressed, but that isn't always the case. Yeah, you get suicidal from time to time, being in captivity and all, but after you've really been lifting during a performance, you have to come down eventually. Lots of dolphins crash right after the performance, which is why they make everybody leave the building right after the show. They're afraid of animal rights activists.

What do dolphins talk about? Here's a typical conversation:

— What do you want to do?

— I don't know. What do you want to do?

— Hey! I asked you first!

That's a typical conversation between and my friend, Buzz, who's another dolphin. Dolphins like to gossip, just like the members of other species. There's always some bottled-nosed hottie that all the guys have their eye on. We may reminisce about the "good old days," before we encountered those Japanese fishermen, but there are some things that we don't like to talk about, like seeing your friends drowned in nets or your parents clubbed to death. Nearly every dolphin and orca in this tank has had similar experiences. In the end, you usually end up getting high. We blow lots of bubbles down here. There isn't much to do here. You can't have sex because hundreds of people see you each day, and you're in a confined space with dozens of other dolphins. That's why dolphins don't breed very well in captivity.

Human beings are really touchy-feelly, even the Japanese. The people who run this place want us to swim near the people so that they will reach out and pet us. It's a fact of life that children, particularly the small ones, like to pet animals. We only let the children pet us. When an adult reaches out with his hand, we swim away like he must be pervert or something— an ichthiophile, I think is what they call it. The female dolphins like to flirt with the clientele, like they're going to get an extra fish or something out of it, but the guys don't like to be touched at all. Me, maybe I'll let some little girl pet me, because children are innocent and pure, and you think that they won't do anything to hurt you. I avoid the really small ones, however, because I have had a few toddlers in their mothers' laps smack me hard on the nose and then laugh their asses off— all in fun, of course. They're just testing the boundaries of reality, and the parent think it's cute, bopping a dolphin on the nose.

Winters are the worst. When the weather starts to get cold, the customers stop coming and they close up shop. Then they bring everything inside and you spend the next four to six months all cooped up, waiting for spring. It sucks. There's nothing to do but wait for spring and summer. When they throw you a fish, you know that it's not from a fresh catch. It's probably from something the fish market down the street threw out. Or maybe they caught if off Madagascar. I might have eaten a coelacanth a few times, if I got lucky. If dolphins could hold their noses...

If dolphins could hold their noses. The difference between us and you guys is that you can play video games. Me, I can't even masturbate. Then, some marine biologist discovered that we dolphins could communicate. Duh! What did they think we were doing when their first heard us making strange sounds (to you) underwater? But some marine biologist, a "seasoned vet," probably said, "They're just passing gas." But even Japanese fishermen can communicate, if only with each other.

You should try talking with whales. I bet we dolphins do it better than you guys. They have their sounds and we ours, and you learn to understand in the end. Eventually you figure it out. But you have to learn the boundaries of reality: no means no. You have to keep your distance, particularly with orcas. (Orcas are intelligent animals, you know: sensitive, even if they will occasionally rip out the tongues of whales with their teeth for food.) You have to keep your distance with everyone, really, something you guys are only just learning.

But back to the fish tank. Most of my contact with other fishes has been in tanks like this one. Humans like to keep the fishes separate, if they can, but they mix hammerhead sharks with great whites and angel fish. If you make sure that a shark is well fed, however, he won't stoop to eating goldfish. You just have to keep your distance with sharks. In the ocean, dolphins and sharks keep their distance because they can kill each other. So do dolphins and orcas. When I see an orca jump out of the water to kiss a woman on the cheek, I think, "Man, that's a lot of trust!" Any orca can tear the head off of a woman easily.

It's July, the summer of my second or third year. The place is full of people. Since the aquarium is in Japan and all the people there are Japanese, they all look alike to me. Even with my limited vision, clouded with water in my eyes, I can still see the girls scantily clad in their halter tops and cutoff shorts, dressed for comfort rather than modesty. Sometimes, you thrust your head out of the water just to get a closer look, though she's a human and you're just a dolphin. When you dance on your tail and speak to her in Flipperese, you think that maybe she'll be impressed, though she can't understand a word that you're saying. However, orcas have the advantage of size, because they can at least give a woman a ride on their backs. That's why Shamu is the Elvis of our business. But any love here is going to go unrequited.

Then one day, the inevitable happens: a child falls into the water. The mother and the father want to jump in and rescue the child, but the water is too deep and they can't swim. As well, the Japanese don't like to step out of the box. They will wait until they are sure that nobody else will jump in and save the child before they conclude that they have to do it themselves or it won't get done. The Japanese are hesitant to do anything, because they are taught to conform to a bunch of rules and they won't do anything unless they first know what the rules of engagement are. (I know that this is only a stereotype, but for the sake of my story, it's true.)

There's a collective "What do we do?" among the crowd. A few grannies even whisper "Oh my!" Instead of trying to rescue their own child, the parents politely call for help while the child thrashes madly in the water. If it drowns, they can always make another one, right? Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese don't have a one child per family policy. But not to worry: there are plenty of rescue workers on hand. It's just a simple matter of somebody throwing the child a life preserver. However, the child is a little too far out to make it easy or convenient for the parents and the rescue workers. The rescue workers are beginning to panic too, because only a few children fall in every year and this rescue is more complicated than what the workers are used to. Nobody knows what to do, it seems. They might have to let this child go.

That's when it hits me. I realize that the little girl could die before she reaches her fifth or sixth birthday unless I do something. A part of you might think, "Hey, it's not my problem. She's a human being out of her element while I'm a dolphin a little bit more in his element." (SeaWorld isn't really my element either, but hey, I can at least swim, though the water is stagnant and contaminated with feces. But at least they're my feces.)

Then I have the mental image of a mammal like me drowning in water. His or her eyes are bulging out of their sockets as they try to breathe in water like a fish and flap their limbs helplessly. Sometimes the drowning victim even breathes in sediment before he or she dies. And I see the look of distress in the child eyes, sending out an SOS. "Help me!" her eyes cry.

You might think it's funny, if you had a warped sense of humour, but I have seen it happen, you know— when those fishermen herded us into their nets. I watched many of my friends drown in nets, because even though dolphins can hold their breaths a lot longer than humans can, in the end, even dolphins will lose consciousness and drown, if they go too long without resurfacing. Until you mercifully pass out from lack of oxygen, drowning is not a peaceful way to die. People really lose it when there isn't enough oxygen going to the brain because oxygen deprivation makes you panic. And, in the end, all death is due to lack of oxygen, which causes death in the tissues and organs.

As they say, if you save one person, you have saved the world. (Though I doubt that it was the Japanese who came up with that pearl of wisdom.) So I do my bit to save the world. I swim around the girl until, in her panic, she reaches out and grabs my dorsal fin, almost pulling me underwater in the process. But not to worry: I have other dolphins to help me, once they realize what I'm trying to do. My friend, Buzz, yells, "Hey, she's drowning! Let's help Flipper save her!"

I try to talk her down from her terror, though I only sound like a dolphin to her. Then I pull her to the edge of the tank and I get a standing O from the crowd and the rescue workers, like it was all part of a well-rehearsed performance.

I know that all I will get for my efforts is a herring or a smelt, or whatever it is that they can get from the fish market before the fish go bad. The mother and father will be eternally grateful to somebody they only know as "Flipper" for having saved their daughter, but my life hasn't changed very much. I'm still just a dolphin in an aquarium, living on herring and smelt: I'm just a big fish in a bath tub to them.

I know that rescuing that child was the right thing to do, but I derive very little satisfaction from it. A Canadian ambulance worker whose grandmother was bayoneted in Hong Kong by Japanese soldiers during World War II would still rescue somebody of Japanese descent, though he or she may still harbour ill feelings towards Asians. It's just something that we do, when we know what to do, regardless of what we feel or what we may want to do. We do it because it's the right thing to do. It's just that, sometimes, doing the right things gives us little or no satisfaction and does little to change our lives.

Sometimes, it even sucks being a hero. And we have to move beyond our triumphs as well as our tragedies.

Time in a Bottle

It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and there was talk of peace and love in the air. While the Vietnam War was in full swing, so was the Summer of Love, as the M-16 rifles of National Guardsmen miraculously sprouted daisies when pointed at anti-war protesters on college campuses across the U.S.

People believed in magic in a young girl's heart. All you needed was love. If you couldn't be with the one you loved, you loved the one you were with. Yes, the world was feeling its gonads by the loving spoonful.

John and Mary met at a coffee shop in Greenwich Village when the guy who sang "Time In A Bottle" was still a great unknown. Though they barely knew each other, they both knew that they wanted to spend eternity together in the bottle that the folk singer was singing about when they first met.

They got what they wished for.

In the first election in which they were eligible to vote, they both voted for Richard Nixon because Tricky Dick had promised to end the Vietnam War toot sweet. Not that either of them were ever in any danger of going: John had a student deferment while Mary was a woman. It was just the principle of the thing. The war in Vietnam was wrong, they felt. The whole American way of life was wrong, as they saw it.

Shortly after they got married, they got caught up in a campus demonstration somewhere in the Midwest. Somebody set fire to the ROTC building and the governor called out the National Guard. John and Mary were two of the students killed when the National Guard opened fire.

Presumably, the National Guardsmen weren't very impressed with the daisies in their rifles.

Like many people who die suddenly, John and Mary weren't aware that they had died at first. They weren't aware that they were in the afterlife, which for them was time in a bottle (which was laying on its side). The Cutty Sark should have given them a clue, but they thought that they were tripping at first.

Then they thought, "Groovy! We're alone!"

For a while, perhaps many centuries, they behaved like any man and woman alone in a bottle. They made love because they were in love, and then they had sex because they were bored. Finally, they were too bored even to have sex with each other. And then they started to fight.

At first, they argued over little things. For instance, taking showers together became less romantic because Mary liked her water colder than John liked his. Then Mary complained that John snored at night while John hated meat loaf.

Sometimes, they found a solution. For instance, they started taking showers separately and John started sleeping on the couch at night. Mary stopped cooking meat loaf.

But other problems defied easy solutions. John started tuning Mary out when she talked, because women's voices have about five basic pitches while men's voices only have about two. Men tend to tune out the higher frequencies more than women. When John couldn't tune her out, he began to bash her around, like one would an old radio that can't pick up a station properly.

Well, naturally, Mary became resentful. Once she anticipated that there was going to be a fight, she began to cut to the chase. Rather than wait for tempers to flare, when both were yelling at each other at the same time, she would start yelling right away. It saved time.

This wasn't just trouble in paradise. It was a societal breakdown between two people because there were only two people and the rules of engagement always changed. Nobody could call the police because they were the police. The Ten Commandments like the one against murder didn't apply because they were already dead and they couldn't murder each other anyway.

Life in the afterlife became like a Roadrunner cartoon. At first, they thought it was cool that both of them could run off a cliff without falling, if they didn't look down. However, even they began to look down.

It became a life of anvils deliberately dropped on feet and baseball bats taken to heads. Once, Mary found a World War II-vintage German Mauser in the closet and emptied its magazine into John. However, John's wounds soon healed miraculously and he was as good as new— like the Vikings who were killed in battle in Valhalla in the Viking afterlife. He merely went to the fridge and got himself a beer.

It would have been easier if both of them had friends, but they soon forgot that they had ever had any friends. They eventually forgot that there had ever been anybody else but them in each other's lives. Oh, they called a truce at the end of the day, but it was only a break in the fighting. It was merely a pause to go to sleep and wake up for another round of fighting the next morning.

If hell is man's separation from God, then what they had was even worse than hell because they were alienated even from each other and from themselves. All they had was their stinking, rotten selves.

Just as people on earth today usually don't know if there was another world before they were born, and another world afterwards, John and Mary soon forgot that there was ever a world outside of their little bottle. Time in a bottle, along with day-to-day living, induces amnesia in the human soul, apparently.

Things came to a head when John split Mary's head down the middle with a Japanese samurai sword. After Mary put the halves of her head back together again, she asked, "Why are we doing this? Can't we do something else?"

"Like what would you suggest?"

"How about you spend a day cleaning up the beach while I clean up that ship over there? That way, we won't get in each other's way."

So John spent a whole day raking up the algae that was washed up on the beach while Mary spent the day trying to clean up the ship. By the end of the day, they were far from finished, so there would be more work the next day.

Both John and Mary spent many days with their different projects. At the end of the day, they were usually too tired to quarrel. What's more, their work began to yield unexpected rewards. Mary found a treasure chest with diamonds, rubies, and gold in the hold of the Cutty Sark while John would find things like oars and the broken pieces of life boats. He even found a telescope one day.

In time, they began to realize that their world inside the bottle was much bigger than they had imagined. Soon John had ventured so far along the beach that he was out of sight of the ship and Mary didn't see him again until many days later.

Mary, on the other hand, saw that there were perhaps thousands of miles of beach on the other side of the Cutty Sark, and she ventured in the opposite direction. John wasn't even aware of this half of the world.

Then one day, John came back with a baby's outfit. Mary realized that a baby had drowned at sea and she was filled with an emotion that had lain dormant for thousands of years: compassion. She even felt the urge to cry.

"There must be other people," Mary said, her voice choked with emotion.

"But where can they be?" John asked.

"I don't know, but they have to be here somewhere."

John held Mary as she cried in his arms. They agreed that they would leave the next morning in opposite directions to search for other people. If they found any survivors, they would bring them back to the ship.

That night, they gathered some driftwood and built a fire on the beach. They even made love under the stars on the beach for the first time in eons.

It now occurred to John, who had studied Buddhism, that maybe he and Mary were bodhisattvas, enlightened beings who had found Nirvana and now felt obligated by a sense of compassion to return to the world to show others the way to enlightenment.

True, they had behaved like idiots in paradise, but it amazed John to think how much greater the world's suffering must be. And if they were wise, how great the world's folly must be!

Then he remembered the wars and the famines, the plagues and the pestilences in the world that he and Mary had left behind. It gave him a headache. He wondered if he was imagining them or if they were real.

About a month after Mary set out in her direction, she thought that she was pregnant when she missed a period. When she missed another period, she was sure of it.

At the end of nine months (which is nothing in eternity), Mary gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. But that's another pair of sleeves, the two children that Mary had.

However, if, for some reason, John and Mary had to abandon their search for other people, their children could take it up.

The Wives of Nasruddin Haji

I had a Muslim friend named Muhsin, who used to share his hookah with me. I realize now that I should have felt very honoured that he would share his hookah with me, because I am not a Muslim, and that meant that he had accepted me as a friend. However, I probably took his friendship for granted at the time.

I would go over to Muhsin's from time to time, and he would fill the bowl of his hookah with some exotic tobacco, and we would smoke it. If it was during the month of Ramadan, where all the Muslims fasted from sunrise until sunset, he was supposed to abstain from tobacco, but his wife, Sami, would cook an elaborate dinner for the evening meal, and invite me and her who was my wife, until she ran off with some other guy.

As he commiserated with me over my wife's scandalous departure, Muhsin said to me, "A woman is a sometime thing, my friend. A woman thinks that a man mainly wants somebody to clean and cook for him, when what he really wants is sex. So a woman may not understand why her husband is suddenly unhappy that he isn't getting it every night. But a woman wants somebody to put food on the table and put a roof over her head, and be able to fix things when they need fixing. She's looking for a pay cheque, and she wants your pay cheque."

To all that, I replied, "A woman wants a man who can open jars, and a man wants a woman who can choose the right tie. My wife can open jars by herself, apparently, and I choose my own ties now."

Then I added, "You Muslims have it made, Muhsin. If your marriage doesn't work out, you can have a second wife without having to divorce the first one."

As Muhsin was filling the bowl of his hookah, he said to me of his tobacco mixture, which looked the grease used to pack ballbearings in, except that it was red: "This has anise in it. These are the dregs of Turkish raki. The Greeks and the Turks like to get drunk on licorice, basically, only they call it raki in Turkey and ouzo in Greece. The only difference is that the Greeks light a fire over the top of the glass to burn the dregs while the Turks let the dregs sink to the bottom."

Then Muhsin said to me, "The Qu'ran allows Muslims to have up to four wives, but there's a reason why polygamy is discouraged rather than encouraged."

And then he told me a story:

There was a man from northern Lebanon who was a haji, because he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, or haj, at some point in his life. Though Nasruddin Haji was a pious man, he was also weak, and he was very foolish. He had a good job in America and a wife and three or four children when his wife, Zina, suffered a stroke at the age of thirty-five or forty.

Now, Nasruddin Haji loved his wife and tried to take care of her, but working full time and taking care of three or four children, as well as an invalid wife who couldn't even speak, soon proved to be too much for him. As well, his virile member lacked a means of expressing its virility.

His widowed mother in Lebanon feared that he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so she hurried to America to help him take care of Zina, his wife, for a while. But when Nasruddin Haji picked up his mother at Dorval International Airport, she was with a distant cousin of hers named Layla, whom he knew but not very well.

As it turned out, Layla was thirty-five years, and a widow with three children because of the war in Lebanon. With the presence of Layla, Nasruddin Haji's virile member now had an outlet for its virility, and he and Layla fell in love— which is what Nasruddin Haji's mother had in mind, believe it or not.

So Nasruddin Haji and Layla were married before an imam at the Arab Cultural Centre in Montreal. Since polygamy is illegal in Canada, Nasruddin Haji had to divorce himself from Zina, the first wife, but not to worry: Nasruddin Haji's mother took care of Zina until she went back to Lebanon, and then Layla would take care of her afterward.

Now, Zina made amazing progress under Layla's care. That's because Layla was a nurse who had worked with stroke patients before. Soon, Zina was walking and talking normally, and able to do the simple things, like eating with a spoon, that she hadn't been able to do immediately after the stroke. Layla had worked a miracle! However, Zina took up all of Layla's time, so that Nasruddin Haji really didn't have any wife rather than having two.

While Layla was busy with Zina, Nasruddin Haji had taken up with a dancer that he had met on Papineau Street, whose name was Caroline. Together, they committed adultery, which is a sin in both the Muslim and Christian faiths. But they don't stone people for adultery in Canada, because Canadians consider themselves to be much civilized then Arabs, though a Canadian man may shoot his wife if he catches her in bed with another man, and he has a gun ready.

However, Canadians are much more blasé about things like adultery, and even homosexuality, than their cousins south of the border, and they have stricter gun laws than the US does.

While Nasruddin Haji was busy with Caroline, Zina and Layla became very close. In fact, the unthinkable happened: they fell in love. Though there were about seven children in the household, they all had to go to school, so Zina and Layla had plenty of occasions to be alone. It was simply a matter of taking the time to watch television in Zina or Layla's bedroom and cuddle in bed in front of the television set. It was easy.

As often happens with cuckholds, however, Nasruddin Haji came home from work early one day and found his two wives in bed together. He couldn't believe it! If he had a gun, he might have shot them, but fortunately, Canada has much stricter gun laws than the US does, and he wasn't armed.

Now, Layla had a way of explaining herself very articulately: "I love her. She makes me feel things that I have never felt before."

Zina merely nodded her head in agreement, though she had regained the gift of speech, which she had lost because of the stroke.

There is a reason why Arabs like big houses: that's because the Arab family is, for the most part, an extended family. It is not unusual for several generations, even three or four, to be living under one roof, and Arabs tend to have lots of children. Remember, Nasruddin Haji was taking care of three or four children with Zina, and three stepchildren with Layla. As well, there might come a time where Layla might admit him to her bed, and she could end up having a child with him.

With him seeing Caroline, however, Nasruddin Haji was seriously thinking about divorcing himself from Layla. After all, he was a pious Muslim, and he couldn't have two lesbians living under his roof. What would his neighbours think?

Or could he?

While Nasruddin Haji was dealing with the scandal of having both of his wives involved in a lesbian affair, Caroline and her little daughter, a toddler named Chantal, were evicted from their apartment for nonpayment of rent, and they had nowhere else to go. So Nasruddin Haji did what he thought any compassionate Muslim would do under the circumstances: he invited Caroline to come live with him and his family.

Now, you might think that a good Muslim family would have a problem with a ballerina living in their midst, but when they saw little Chantal, the women and the girls of the household fell in love with her immediately. With blond hair and blue eyes like her mother, Chantal was the most beautiful, most angelic baby that they had ever seen. As well, her mother, Caroline was just gorgeous, a blond-haired and blue-eyed goddess— what Hitler would have called a perfect Aryan.

I probably wouldn't be exaggerating very much if I said that Zina and Layla were taken by Caroline as well.

Zina, Layla, and Caroline all had one thing in common: they liked to dance. From Zina and Layla, and the older girls of the household, Caroline learned how to do the belly dance. As she had been dancing her entire life, learning ballet as a child, and jazz dancing as an adolescent, Caroline soon caught on; she was soon as proficient at the belly dance as the other females of the household. What's more, she soon was able to speak Arabic with some fluency, because she and her little girl heard it all the time in that household.

However, in Nasruddin Haji's dirty little mind, the three women became associated with the Three Graces of classical Greek mythology, as he had fantasies of them dancing together in the living room au naturel with their arms around each other's shoulders and kicking their legs out like Rockettes. Whether they really did such a thing, of course, is beside the point: what's more important here is the perception of reality rather than the reality itself. So Nasruddin Haji became concerned that his wife, his de jure ex-wife, and his concubine were engaged in lesbian ménages à trois while he was at work.

Of course, Nasruddin Haji never thought to ask his women if they were actually doing such things, because what would they say? Nor did he pay any attention to what his children were saying, if indeed they had said anything at all. Surely, if something was amiss, one of the little innocents would have said something in all innocence, right?

Children are the eyes of God. They see the things that God is too busy to pay attention to.

Then Caroline became pregnant. She insisted, with all the sincerity that only a ballerina could muster, that the unborn child was Nasruddin Haji's. "I swear, my dear," she said, "I love nobody but you."

And then she kissed Nasruddin Haji on the lips.

For the first time, religion became an issue. Up until Caroline became pregnant, nobody had any problem with the fact that she still considered herself a Christian, and that she wanted to raise little Chantal in the Catholic Church as well. In fact, Zina and Layla were charmed by how the little one knelt beside her little bed each night, with eyes closed, and said the Notre Père and the Marie, je vous salue. How cute! they thought.

The problem with the unborn child was his religion, since Nasruddin Haji was considered the father: was he to be raised a Muslim or a Christian? For Nasruddin Haji (and Zina and Layla), the issue was already settled: the unborn child would be raised as a Muslim until he made the shahada, or confession of faith, for himself: "I believe that there is no god but Allah, and that Mohammed is His Prophet." Then he would actually be a Muslim.

Well, for Caroline, the issue was also settled: there would be a christening soon after birth, and then the little one would go to Catholic school, along with his big sister. On this issue, she was just as obstinate as Nasruddin Haji.

"So what happened?" I asked Muhsin. "Did either of them budge?"

Muhsin sadly shook his head and said, "No, this is a case of good loving gone bad. Caroline decided to make it easier for everybody. She moved out, and the Three Graces were no more. If there were ever any lesbian ménages à trois while Nasruddin Haji was at work, they were a thing of the past now."

Then he concluded his story:

It could have gotten messy, however. When Caroline was moving out with little Chantal and the newborn, whose name was Joseph, Layla and Zina literally tried to snatch the baby out of her arms, possibly to spirit him to Lebanon, where he could be raised as a Muslim. They could have torn little Joe apart, but Zina's oldest daughter, Aysha, with the Wisdom of Solomon, fired a pistol into the ceiling to shut everybody up and restore some sanity to the situation.

"We all know who the mother is," Aysha pointed out, "but the father could be anybody. Are we going to take the word of some ballerina just because she says that our beloved father is the father of this baby? If she wants to leave, we should just let her leave."

Adolescents can be so articulate!

According to rumour, after the birth of little Joe, who, they say, was in the spitting image of Nasruddin Haji, Caroline ran off to the Middle East and started a career as a belly dancer. On some nights, she made over $50,000, mostly at bachelor parties for Arab princes. After two years' time, dancing in all the sexual cauldrons between the Rock of Gibraltar and the Persian Gulf, she was a millionairess, because she saved her piastres. Then, during the Cannes Film Festival, she met a Christian business man from Lebanon on a nudist beach and got married.

"And what of Zina and Layla?" I asked. "I'm sure they continued to watch TV and cuddle together while the kids were in school, right?"

Muhsin slowly nodded his head and replied, "Yes, only Layla started working nights at Royal Victoria Hospital full time as a registered nurse, in case Nasruddin Haji filed for divorce and she had to support herself and Zina. However, Nasruddin Haji hasn't filed for divorce. Layla merely approached him and said, 'I want a child, or I will divorce myself from you. It wouldn't look good, my dear husband, if it became known that you fathered a child with a stripper out of wedlock but not with your own wife.'

"Nasruddin Haji has had not one but two children with Layla, a son and a daughter. So you see, Layla and Zina have the best of both worlds. They can have each other in the daytime, and take turns with their beloved husband after he comes home at night. As the Arab community sees it, both are good wives and loving mothers, because both of them have produced children for Nasruddin Haji. And if Nasruddin Haji divorced himself from Layla, he would have to pay alimony to support the children that he has had with her, because that's the law in Canada. If there are any ménages à trois in that household now, they involve Nasruddin Haji— probably another reason why the Prophet discouraged polygamy."

"But isn't it true," I asked, "that a wife's testimony is only worth one-quarter of that of the husband?"

"Yes," Muhsin conceded, "but that's because a Muslim can have up to four wives at the same time, and can easily produce four witnesses against himself."

Then Muhsin told me another, much shorter story to illustrate his point about polygamy: "There was an old man who had two wives, one old and one young. Both wives loved him to distraction, but the first wife, who was old, would pluck her husband's dark hairs while he slept in her bed at night, because his dark hairs reminded her of her long-lost youth. Then the younger wife would pluck his grey hairs whenever he slept in her bed, because they made him look like an old man. Then, he woke up one morning to find that he had hair on neither his head nor his chin.

"So in conclusion, my friend, polygamy is a bad thing, because a Muslim man must love each wife equally."

Of course, I didn't say it, but if Nasruddin Haji really had three bisexual women living under the same roof, they could have easily broken off into pairs each night, and then everybody would have been happy.

But I didn't say it, because there are some things that you just can't say.