Read Demon Box Page 17


  You were drifting.

  Oh, no! I was thinking.

  I was -

  You were drifting.

  After a solitary supper I shuffle back to my cabana. I can't rest or write. Rest from what? Write what? I have less an idea of what I'm looking for than when I left Oregon a month ago. My poke's about played out and the cards have been cold or crooked, like that Marag and his five-pound fake map.

  And my ace in the hole? The Murine bottle that I had promised myself to use should all else fail? Out of the question. As Muldoon Greggor expressed it, "I wouldn't want to try to divine its secret with acid. Soon as your armor was blasted away, these watchmen and hustlers would crawl all over you. They wouldn't leave anything but a dry husk."

  I do have one of those five hash fingers left. That's safer. Perhaps, if I could get a place on the back side in one of those tombs, under the stars in sight of the Sphinx... bound to afford more inspiration than this cinderblock cell. So I gather my paraphernalia and strike out into the night.

  It's late. The road is empty of cabs. The sentries nod me past. The searchlights and speakers of the evening's Sound and Light are shut away in their tombs and bolt-locked, but there's plenty of illumination: the moon heralded new by that Ramadan cannon two weeks ago is now nearing full; the Great Pyramid shines mournfully under it for lack of anything better to do.

  On the moony slope I find the seat where we were brought by Muldoon that first night. There's more wind than I thought. I roll a page from my notebook and light it with my last match. I didn't twist it tight enough and it flares up but I'm determined to get one hit, sucking so frantically at the hookah mouth tube that I'm unaware I have company.

  "Good evening, Mr. D'bree."

  I see his little face glittering so close that I think at first it's the flame itself. Hash sparks fly everywhere.

  "You have trouble with hubble-bubble this good evening?" I tell him not anymore, no. With the last flicker we both can see the bowl is empty. I toss the ash into darkness. He tells me he is most sorry, but to come, follow him, for a more nicer smoke than hubble-bubble. Does he mean a joint? This hash and hookah business is very ritzy but a joint would be nice...

  Marag takes me to one of the tombs down the slope where the limestone plateau just begins to drop away toward the village. There is a faint rectangle of light hissing from the tomb's door; Marag stops me with a feathery hand on my arm before we get too close.

  "This is my friend," he whispers. "A young desert boy but already guard this corner. Very good position! Still, he is not at ease, it is not his home. You got hashish?"

  "You're not gonna mix it with tobacco? I don't smoke, and cigarettes hit me harsh."

  "No. No harsh cigarette. Good stuff, from Finland. You'll see." He reaches the door of the tomb just as a faceless form is coming out with a carbine to check on the noise. The light hisses brighter and they stand talking in it. Our desert boy wears a mask of shadows. I can see the rifle is an ancient American Springfield.30-.06 left over from the battle of Bordeaux, and I can see the way his hands fondle it, but his face I can't see.

  Marag brings him over. He tells him my name but not me his; nor do we shake hands. He doesn't speak. The turban he has cowling his face is patched and frayed with age, though I judge him some years short of twenty. But not a boy; probably never a boy.

  I get some kind of pass from this phantom because he lowers the.30-.06 and trades it for a carpet. He unrolls the carpet on the sand and nods us to sit. From his gellabia pocket he takes a tin box and opens it. Marag reaches again for my hashish and I relinquish it reluctantly.

  The phantom carefully heats and crumbles the hash into the box. Nobody says anything. He's very meticulous and takes a very long time to roll three big sticks. We could have been smoking the first one while he practiced but nobody says anything. He finally lights and passes it to me.

  "It is tobacco all right!"

  "But not cigarette," Marag hastens to add. "It's pipe tobacco. And Finnish!"

  The guy's wife steps from the door of the tomb into the moonlight, carrying a copper tray and three glasses. She is traditionally barefooted and pregnant and the fact embarrasses her. When she leans to place the tray on the sand you can feel the blush. Marag makes some crack in Arabic about her girth and she skitters back into the tomb.

  The tea is wickedly strong and sweet but the Finnish tobacco, I'm forced to admit by the time we're done with the first round, isn't all that bad. The wife appears with a kettle as the husband is lighting the second joint - spliff, rather - refills our glasses, and disappears again, all in a moment. This round of tea is milder and they are running low on sugar, but right on cue with the third joint she appears to replenish us. Hardly more than hot water. She remains outside, indicating that the goodies are gone; if more is wanted it will require her trotting barefooted to the village. She stands as though weightless for all her swollen condition, the globe of her belly buoying her up. The husband finishes the weak drink and returns the glass to the tray before he shakes his head no; we've had enough.

  She leans to take up the tray. This time the young husband reaches to her foot and affectionately squeezes her bare instep. Marag gasps at this most un-Moslemlike display.

  "It is as they say." He clucks. "These kids smoke dope and our old ways of behave are forget."

  I guess it must be Marag's version of irony, but it's hard to say. That last one did it. The gas light from the tomb hisses back down and the moon moons. We sit for a long time, looking at the stars and listening to the dogs keep each other abreast of the neighborhood night. When it's time to leave, we all three stand at once. The young guard puts the tin box in his pocket and rolls up his carpet. The shadow head on the shadow body nods goodbye and disappears after its mate.

  Never a word. Never a chin or cheekbone let stray out in the prying moonlight. But that faceless presence has furnished a circle in the dirt with the grandeur of Araby.

  We are scrabbling down into the village, where Marag is going to make another score for me. I'm high like a motherfucker. The Sphinx looks like a big old mouser purring by the path, fat on camels and Fiats.

  "My young friend is far from his Bedouin home." Marag feels he must explain, looking back up the dim trail at me. "I get him this position. He is family. I leave that village too, when I am very little, very young. His relative get me position."

  He was turned around walking backwards down the steep rut now.

  "This young fellow, I think he will not stay long. He will go back to the desert for the birth. When he comes back I will get him another position. It is good, is it not? Having a person like family at the pyramid?"

  I can't help wondering what he's trying to promote me into. Maybe I should make it clear that a wealthy globetrotter I am not. It could be years before I can afford to return, decades. He should save his pitch for a better prospect.

  I can't go with him to score, he explains. I will wait at his home. I follow him down sandstone paths that get wider and leveler until they become miniature streets crisscrossing between a maze of tiny block dwellings. The streets are too narrow for cars but there's plenty of traffic-nocturnal strollers and striders, men and women, goats and kids. Cronies squatting against the wall grin and wink at Marag whisking past with a big live one in tow.

  In the square of light before one of the doorless doorways a knot of kids are playing with homemade clay marbles. A little boy jumps up from the game and scampers after us. He looks about seven, which means he's probably close to eleven if you allow for the protein lag. Marag pretends not to notice him, then gruffly makes as if to swat him away. The kid ducks, laughing, and Marag takes him by the hand.

  "This is Mister Sami," he explains, still gruff. "My oldest son. Sami, say hello to my friend Mister Deb-ree."

  "Good evening, Mister Deb-ree," the boy says. "Is nice evening?" His handshake is as light as his father's.

  We cross a shared yard jammed between four mud huts and enter Marag's home. From the
ceiling a single dim bulb gradually coaxes the room from the night. It is only slightly bigger than the guard's tomb. There are two big trunks; one carpet and one grass mat; one big bed and two bunks; no chairs or cupboards; no tables. For decoration there is a hanging tapestry with kids' art pinned to it and a long bundle of sugarcane in the corner, bound with a gay red ribbon.

  Marag introduces me to his wife, a tiny woman with one of the milked-over eyes so frequently seen in the Egyptian poor. Also to Mister Ahmed, Missy Shera, Mister Foo-Foo, all younger than Sami.

  Marag takes a pillow from the bed and places it on the floor next to the wall and bids me sit. The kids squat in a semicircle and stare at me while Marag helps his wife pump a little white gas burner to hissing flame. I blow my harmonica for the kids and let them play with my compass. The wife begins to prepare tea for us in a little copper kettle.

  I ask Sami how he got a crescent scar on his forehead. Grinning, he points toward the pyramid and pantomimes a tumble with his hands.

  "It was a bad fall," Marag says. "But maybe it convince him the spirits want him to be an educated, not a pyramid goat. He can read and count and draw pictures now, Mister Sami can." He beams at the boy in unabashed wonder. "He can write."

  From the foot of the top bunk he takes down a notebook to show me, the very one that donated a page for that map. He proudly points out the pictures and words.

  "Mr. Deb-ree is an artist and doctor, Sami. Maybe he draw for you a picture while I go on an errand."

  After Marag leaves with my five-pound note, Sami and I exchange drawings. I do a Mickey Mouse and Sami does the pyramid. I tell him it looks too steep and he turns to the back page. Taped to the inside cover with electrician's tape is a dollar bill. It's taped Great Seal side up, and written beneath it, first in Arabic, then English, in the careful and patient hand of any good grade-school teacher in any language, is the translation of the two Latin slogans: new order of ages and allah has prospered our beginnings.

  "Did your daddy give you this the other night?"

  Yes, he nods, frowning at the page to remember what else his teacher has told him. "It is Roman lira pound?"

  "No," I tell him; "it is Yankee dollar, American simoleon buck." Marag is gone a long time. The wife puts Missy Shera and Mister Ahmed to bed. It must be past midnight but they're still wide-eyed and excited, staring at me from their bunks.

  She takes up little Mister Foo-Foo and sits on the edge of the bed and drops one shoulder of her smock. In the dim light she looks withered way beyond her years. But all the kids are healthy, plumper than most of the pyramid pack I've seen. Maybe that's why she's withered.

  Foo-Foo roots in. Mom closes her one good eye and rocks gently to and fro on the edge of the bed, humming a monotonous nasal lullaby. Foo-Foo watches me unblinking as he sucks and rocks.

  A scrawny turkey chick wanders in the open door and Sami shoos it back outside. In a corner of the yard I see a very old woman milking a goat. She grins at Sami shooing the chick and calls something in Arabic.

  "Mother-my-father," he explains. "Is right?"

  "Grandmother, we say. Sami's grandmother." After she finishes she rubs the goat's bag with oil from a jar and brings the bucket of milk in. She doesn't acknowledge me at all. She pours half the milk into the copper kettle on the cold gas burner and covers the rest with a cloth over the top of the bucket. She unties a long stalk of sugarcane from the bundle in the corner. She takes up her half bucket and shuffles out. The stalk brushes the bulb and the shadows rock back and forth. The humming never stops and all the little eyes are still wide in the dreamy light swinging, watching me, even the goat's square pupils in the yard outside, glowing yellow at me as she chomps the cane...

  Back at the cabana. I fell asleep on Marag's floor and had a hell of a dream, that the village had been struck by a sandstorm. I couldn't see. In despair I tried to call but sand filled my throat. All I could make out was the rising din of thousands of impatient horns.

  When Marag returned and woke me I was sweating and panting. So was he, after his run. But this time he had only one little taped cartridge to show for his hours of effort. He handed it to me, apologizing. It lay in my hand in the dim light and both of us felt very sad.

  As he guided me from his house through the tiny thoroughfares to Sphinx Street, he continued to apologize and promise to make things good. I told him the deal was cool and not to worry over it! It was just a little burn.

  "The deal is not cool!" he insisted. "Is a bad burn. I bring the rest of the deal tonight, eight o'clock at Mena House - guaranteed!"

  He kept on and on about it in a distracted tirade. I finally got him off the subject by telling him what a nice family he had.

  "You are kind saying so. What about Sami, you like Sami? Is smart boy, my Mister Sami?"

  I told him yeah, I liked Sami, he was plenty smart.

  "Smart enough to catch up in one of your modern schools?"

  "Sure. He's a bright kid. Personable and alert and bright, like his daddy. I bet he would be up with the other kids in a matter of weeks."

  "I bet, too," he said, pleased.

  I told him good night at the Sphinx. I was over the hill and nearing the hotel before I finally put it together. Marag hadn't been promoting himself - it was Sami. Like any father he has his dream: the son is taken back to the Land of Opportunity by some gentleman, raised in a modern home, sent to a modern United States school. The kids get a chance to break into the twentieth century; the gentleman gets a permanent liaison with the past..."A friend always at the pyramid." Not a bad scam. No wonder you were so upset about that hash; you had bigger deals wheeling. For all your light touch and soft sell, Marag, you're a stone hustler...

  October 29. Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost, 300th day. Slept till Muldoon and Jacky wake me just in time to see the sun going down. They push me into the shower and send a pool boy to bring a pot of coffee. Jacky has reservations at the Auberge to see Zizi Mustafa, the most famous dancer of them all, and Muldoon has news of a hot archeological find in Ethiopia.

  "An abdomen that ought to be put in the Louvre!" Jacky promises.

  "A human skull that pushes us millions of years back further than Leakey's find!" says Muldoon. "And no monkey business about it; this cranium is human! Darwin was full of crap!"

  "Maybe," says Jacky, always a little reluctant to reorient his thinking or his anatomical focus. "On the other hand, maybe his evolutionary theory was right but his time scale was slightly off. That we still come from monkeys only it took us longer."

  "That's not the question, Jacky." I'm out of the cold shower and hot into the discussion. "The question is did we or did we not fall!" As we are walking through the lobby I suddenly remember Marag's resolve to meet me at eight with the rest of my purchase.

  "Eight in Egyptian means somewhere between nine and midnight," Jacky translates. "That's if he shows up at all."

  I leave word at the desk to have Marag go on down to my cabana if he shows up before I return. I go back and unlock the door just in case and leave the hookah on the nightstand.

  After we eat the elaborate Auberge supper we find that the dancer doesn't come on until nine. At ten they say midnight. Muldoon says he's in the middle of exams and can't wait any longer. I talk Jacky into coming back out to the Mena House with me; we can check out Marag and still make it back for the dancer. We get a cab, drop Muldoon at his place, and head back to Giza. By the time we get to the Mena House it is after eleven and no sign of Marag. The door to my cabana is ajar but nothing is waiting for me on the nightstand. We walk out to the street while Jacky regales me with some Arabic wisdom regarding gullibility. The doorman signals for a cab, then asks in a hazy afterthought, "By the way, sir, are you not Mister Deb-ree?"

  I tell him I am called so by some.

  "Ah, then, there was waiting for you a person. But he has left."

  When? Ah, sir, minutes ago, sir; he waited a long time. Where? In utility room, sir, out of sight. Didn't you tell this per
son to go on down to my cabana as I instructed? Oh, no, sir; that we cannot do! They would be bothering our guests, these persons... They! Who the hell do you think you are? Official doorman, sir. How long did this person wait for me? Oh, that we could not say; the person was sitting waiting when we came on duty at seven thirty.

  "But when he left," he says, finally dragging his fist free of his gaudy pocket, "he gave for you me this package."

  And he holds out my red handkerchief. Inside are the other four taped cardboard cartridges and my Uni pen.

  October 30, Wednesday. My last day in Egypt.

  I feel shitty about Marag. No luck at all trying to locate his house in the labyrinth of that village. Nor with the tomb where the young Bedouin couple were living. They left in the night, a new watchman tells me. Does he know Marag? Everyone knows Marag. Held the World Record Up-and-down Pyramid, Marag. Where does he live? Somewhere in village. When does he come on duty? Sometimes late night, sometimes early morning, sometimes not for days... Oh, a man of unpredictable moods, Marag, many of them dark.

  In Cairo I smoke a cartridge with Jacky and Muldoon and give one to each. I have to be clean on the plane back. I give Muldoon my four-volume PYRAMIDOLOGY by Rutherford. We mumble goodbyes and I hurry back out to Giza. Still no Marag on the dark aouda. My plane isn't until 10 a.m. but I leave word at the desk to wake me at 6.

  VI

  October 31, Halloween morn. Up before the sun. I recheck my packing (three girls from Oregon are right now serving a life sentence for dope in Turkey, where my plane lands after Cairo); nothing but the last ball of hash. And the Murine bottle. The hash I can swallow at the airport, but what about this stuff? Just flush it down the toilet? That's like carrying the key all the long battle to the castle and up the wall to the maiden locked behind the massive tower door, then chickening out for fear she'll be a bitch and tossing it in the moat.

  I've got to try. Never get another chance. There's not enough time left to swallow it - it would be flight time before I took off - but if I bang it...

  So I'm headed again up the hill for one last desperate attempt, the Murine bottle in my shoulder bag, the insulin outfit in my pocket. By the time I reach the aouda I'm shaking all over with trepidation. I lean against the casing stones to reinforce my resolve but I keep shivering. It's chilly and gray. A whirlwind comes winding across the empty aouda, gathering a fanatical congregation of scraps. The wind spins, like the spirit of a new messiah, inspiring corn husks, cigarette packs, the shells of yesterday's pumpkin seeds... lifting newspapers, gum papers, toilet papers high and higher. What a following! Then the spirit evaporates and the wind unwinds. The Zealots drift back to the limestone.