The Road from Damascus (37 page)

Grey matter. Sami had eaten sheep’s brains in Syria, boiled, with a squeeze of lemon.

‘Evolution has developed this very complex, very useful machine, the brain, and has incidentally fitted it out for spiritual experience. The irony is that the brains of the future may well be more spiritual than ours, even as we discover the physical causes of spirituality. Evolution will ensure it. Spiritual people live longer, happier lives. They tend to have more success at work, and better interpersonal relationships. Even if it’s illogical, spirituality appears to be good for us.’

‘I see.’ Sami blankly observing Fencestoat’s slight, busy face.

‘It probably started as an accident,’ Fencestoat went on. ‘Like wings. In fact, like everything gained through evolutionary mechanism. A religious person would say it’s God’s plan.’ He snorted softly. ‘That’s probably what we’d like it to be. Wishful thinking.’

Sami sensed himself reddening, and an obstruction in his throat, became aware of the downturn of his mouth.

‘Arts and sciences,’ Fencestoat conceded. ‘It’s a matter of interpretation. The body, after all, is the temple of the soul. Or of God, I can’t recall my divinity lessons.’

Sami sniffed. ‘Anyway,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Fencestoat. ‘Moving on. What we’ll be examining today are temporal lobe experiences. Temporal lobe epileptics frequently report supernatural visions, of the demonic or of the divine. Even between seizures they can be religious to the point of fanaticism. Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a temporal lobe epileptic. Have you read
The Idiot
?’

‘No,’ said Sami. ‘I’m a specialist in Arabic literature.’

‘Very well. The Prophet of Islam, then, who used to shiver when his trances approached, and to fall from his camel under their weight. There is a theory that he was an epileptic.’

‘I’m a specialist in mysticism too. Not only Islamic.’

‘Very good.’

‘And English Renaissance poetry. John Donne.’

‘Good. Good.’

‘I’ve stopped now. I’m not an academic any more.’

‘So Dr Schimmer tells me. Yes.’

‘Go on,’ said Sami.

‘So. Our research stimulates the temporal lobes of our subjects with weak electromagnetic fields. We provoke microseizures, and observe the results. That’s what we’ll be doing this morning.’

‘You’re going to give me an epileptic fit?’

‘Oh, nothing so dramatic.’ Fencestoat waved a hand too quickly, as if it was something he’d practised in front of a mirror. ‘Tiny doses of electromagnetism. If it wasn’t safe it wouldn’t be legal.’

Sami, more Englishman than Arab, trusted legality. And there was money coming.

‘All right, then,’ he said.

There was a form to fill in, boxes to tick. The thrust of it was, to what extent are you a loon?

I am personally important to the course of history.

Strongly Agree, Agree, No Opinion, Disagree, Strongly Disagree.

Important interests want me silenced.

I attend church/mosque/temple on a regular basis.

I am angry with the world.

I am never clean.

It is possible to communicate with the dead.

And so on.

When he’d finished, Fencestoat handed him a cheque for two hundred pounds. ‘We are unusually lucky with our funding,’ he said.

Fencestoat led him into a dim inner chamber. A snappy blonde assistant smeared conducting cream on his temples. ‘And Persin-ger’s helmet,’ said Fencestoat, producing a green motorcycle helmet and squeezing it with a damp pop over Sami’s head. ‘Fitted with solenoids,’ said Fencestoat, ‘for the transcranial stimulation.’ The blonde, in a white coat, hair cruelly tied back from pinched but foxy features, pressed goggles around his eyes. They closed on his skin in an airtight gasp. She lowered him, blind, on to an imitation-leather recliner. It was Fencestoat’s talk about sexual bliss, orgasms, that made Sami feel he was involved in something perverse. Some new form of unfaithfulness.

He pictured himself on the institutional couch, used by so many before him, under the pyramid of suspended brain tools he’d seen before they removed his senses.

‘Now relax.’ Fencestoat’s voice muffled. ‘We’ll be next door, measuring and observing. It’ll take about thirty minutes, a little more maybe. You don’t need to do anything at all.’

And Sami told himself,
enjoy it
, like a man with scruples who’s taken the leap and paid a prostitute, handed the cash over and his pride with it. Half an hour ahead of him. Enjoy it. Money in his pocket, independently earned. A neutral temperature. No car noise here.

Packaged up, his head is large and the world small, becoming smaller. Unseen, unreal. He thinks he might sleep. His ears lost in the helmet, his bones puffed up against the goggles, their aerated spongy interior inflating until his head isn’t there at all nor his body, just relaxed cloud buffeted in a roofless sky. On a silent breeze. If anything is thick it’s time, widening, expanding, absolutely still. He floats. Not him. Cloud floats.

A black and sickly thundercloud angry at the sky’s edge.

Nur finger-combing his curls. Little boy Sami. She hums an ancient tune. He ends not at his scalp but at the top of her hand, which the cold air kisses.

A boy’s voice singing Qur’an on the stereo:

He deprived them of their garment (of God-consciousness) in order to make them aware of their nakedness…

Each Arabic word ending on a long ‘maa’ sound, like mama,
mama
, says Sami,
maama
, but he isn’t naked, he’s wrapped up in towels, in the couch of her body, her fingers in his curls, he ends where she does, against the wind:

yanzi’u ‘anhumaa libaasahumaa liyuriyahumaa saw’aatihimaa…

The wind over the recitation takes a desolate turn.

Slamming a door. His father’s voice wanting to know, ‘What’s that bloody noise?’ A constriction. The force of Sami’s adult body bearing down on him. Black and bloody walls. Detention chamber. Screams. Animal breath:
ullahullahullahullahu.
The looming secret, Mustafa looming.

Part of him saying, not again, I thought I’d done enough of this. I thought I’d finished this.

And really it’s so old, so déjà vu, that it holds no more novelty and no more fear. Freed of fear he is free to hate. Or to love properly. He turns around, finding a sword’s handle in his grasp, and the centaur snorting and galloping at him. He stabs it upwards through the throat, through flank and gristle, pushing hard.

‘You did it?’ he asks.

‘Yes, I did it. You know I did.’

‘Why?’

‘I thought it was worth it. Now, you know what to do.’

More stabbing, more gore. The son sacrifices the father, whose horse body quickly dissolves. Mustafa raises a palm in farewell. Leaves lightly, in human form. Cloud dissipates into light rain.

The blonde removing the goggles from his eyes. Harsh light. Unsticking the helmet from his head. Helping him to his feet.

Sami stumbled from the chamber, past a sage Fencestoat, to a narrow bathroom. He washed the gel from his hair, but didn’t bother doing a thorough job of it. Walked over to Fencestoat’s paper-strewn desk, more steadily now.

‘So,’ Fencestoat tapping on a keyboard, ‘tell me what happened.’

‘Difficult to put into words,’ said Sami. Water trickled into his beard.

‘So first you felt…’ Dry voice scratching at scabs of meaning.

‘Relaxed,’ said Sami.

‘Right.’ Fencestoat entering data. ‘Caused by what we call Burst X. A very pleasant frequency. And then?’

‘I don’t know. A childhood memory perhaps.’

‘A sensed presence?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Please, Mr Train, don’t be embarrassed. Subjects have seen…’ – swiftly fanning the practised hand – ‘… Bhuddas of compassion, little green men, deceased family members, tunnels of light. The lot. All from a little brain crackle.’

‘Nothing so dramatic, professor. No visions of God. I saw my parents.’

‘Right. The Thomas Pulse causes the sensed presence. Because of mismatched left and right hemispheric activity your normal sense of yourself is misinterpreted. You feel some “other” is with you. The amygdala and the hippocampus make the experience more emotional.’ Peering at Sami, ‘Perhaps, more personal?’

‘Certainly it was personal. They were my parents.’

‘Can you expand?’

‘Not really. I saw my parents. I was a child again. I hope your funds haven’t been wasted on me.’

‘Not at all. We have some excellent readings. Thank you, Mr Traifi.’

Sami stepped out into the noise. Above the Earth’s steady magnetism there was the ongoing crackle of millions of human nervous systems, and power lines, car electrics, radio receivers, fixed phone lines and mobile radiation, TV reception, stereos, refrigerators, air conditioners. The net. Gossamer strings of the web intersecting through his cerebrum. Sami standing inside an overarching dome of electromagnetism, a stone thrown into a pool, his feet at the centre of the ripple, throbbing outwards for ever.

If there are aliens out there they’ll hear us soon. We’re getting louder. Our radio waves spin out on concentric ripples: polite broadcasts first, received pronunciation boldly going into the void, then wars, speeches, pop music, disaster reports, to shock jocks and jungle pirates. Accumulating until our current cacophony. Relentlessly to the stars. Screaming to be heard.

The human urge for contact has brought us a century of noise. We want to go beyond the body, beyond the planet. It’s a desire which we all share: the desire to touch another. To be touched.

It was the opening night of Gabor’s exhibition, the night his fingers would reach through canvas to probe the public mind. He intended, also, a more carnal probing: to achieve the climax he believed the summer had been leading to. And here she was: Muntaha arriving, slipping gracefully through glass doors, dipping her profile with mixed pride and modesty away from the art crowd in attendance. A hasty breeze blew through her nostrils and over her silken upper lip, wind from her exertions on East London’s thin pavements and narrow, sometimes cobbled streets. These hyper-urban, post-imperial streets walled by four-storey converted warehouses, towers at their horizons brown and yellow like Liquorice Allsorts – streets Gabor felt proprietorial about, since he’d chosen to live in them, since his grandfather had trodden them before him. And Muntaha’s feet treading them now.

She was dressed up, in long black skirt, patterned blouse, swirling hijab, smarter still than usual. For him. And she entered this place at his invitation. Into an atmosphere cohering around him, for tonight at least. Emanating from him and his success.

Her dark, intelligent eyes thudded from face to face as she smoothed her skirt, finding her bearings. She picked out his mother’s jutting chin and brows, the pinched Hungarian merchant expression melted to approval for once, bathing in his reflected glory. Muntaha’s eyes rested on the journalists with notebook and dictaphone. She noticed the beautiful women in her shadow, and Gabor noticed her noticing, and hoped she understood his history with them. History he’d renounce for her. She registered the easily assimilated crowd of all styles, colours and influences, nearly as much brown as white, overwhelmingly mobile and optimistic.

There were bulbs of champagne being handed around, cocaine if you watched carefully. What has been called space reggae bubbling in the corners. And Gabor the sun, the nucleus. She his chosen one. He let everyone see this was the case, by his gaze and his open palms. Music and people parting like the Red Sea to let her through. Her nose broad and strong between her eyes, a masculine force in her, but still archetypally female in his vision. A woman caught sparkling in the summer evening sunlight which washed the gallery’s white rectangle in gold, atoms dancing around her, light and shade, nesting in her swells and depressions. Her skin had a recent surface darkness like the ghost of reddish brown on Assyrian wall paintings, museum faces ready to flake but kept timeless with sealant. She was darkened beyond her usual tone just from walking down the street. Good to have skin like that, he thought. Good to rub your fingerprints against it, to push it on to the bone.

She took both his hands, and from the discomfort of her smile he judged his offering of both to have been overly theatrical. But it was a special occasion, and she was the guest work of art. He didn’t tell her that yet. He saved it for later.

She looked away from him at the postcards on a nearby table. Like the banner over the gallery entrance, they read:
The Paradox of the Particle/Wave Duality: Connected Work by Gabor Vronk.

‘The theme of it all is connection. Unity.’ He tried to make his voice warmer. ‘Connection, Muntaha. Let me show you around.’

He was thinking, tonight’s the night. He’d made his preparations for the long-hoped-for connection. Scissored pubic beard and razored armpits, as Muslim men do. So he’d heard. Made of his studio bedroom an advertisement for himself and an elaborate trap. Clean but artfully cluttered, with paintings and sketches and notebooks, enough to suggest an inexhaustible well of creative energy, strewn with rhythmed intensity towards the bed. Islamic books within eyeshot, the paths to sexual and spiritual bliss neatly enfolded. Gulf frankincense burning in the kitchen to cloak the Slavic odours of pickled fish. Windows open to the balmy East London night. Clean sheets on the mattress. The climax, he was thinking, perhaps a couple of hours away, and so much ahead of him to learn and experience in those two hours. A woman like that, when she chooses to unlace herself, fireworks are expected.

Fireworks from the east. There’s nothing prudish in Islam. Gabor had thoroughly researched it. The original faith doesn’t ask anyone to lie back and think of Mecca. It holds sex in high regard, despite the puritanism of some contemporary clerics who, out of touch with their own tradition, imitate Victorian Christianity. Ali said: ‘God created sexual desire in ten parts. Nine parts he gave to women and one part to men.’ Foreplay is recommended. So much so that the Prophet gave as an example of cruelty a man having intercourse with his wife without arousing her with foreplay first. Sexual pleasure is a marital right. The failure of a husband to pleasure his wife is legitimate grounds for divorce. And divorce in Islam is quick and easy. If she’d married Sami according to Islamic regulations she’d be free of him by now. So Gabor saw no cultural or legal obstruction to their first night of knowledge. It’s the tribal background that turns women’s bodies into suitcases of honour, and she’d liberated herself from that.