Diabolic Digest
Episode II –
Urban guerrilla – Cat and mouse
Place: 6th October Bridge
Date: 23rd July 2000
Time: 7:45
pm
Why did I bother? It was hardly necessary. The
taxi driver barely needed the invitation to ‘step on it!’ but I needed the
sense of drama that the word would conjure up. The running dive I had to take
to get on was an early signal of the ride to come.
However, tonight, the haste was
justified. It was a matter of life and death (and I’m not just talking about
the taxi journey). I was in a race against the clock (a futile endeavour, you
may say, in Cairo), because I had an appointment with destiny to persuade her
to avert certain doom.
The taxi bounds up the approach road to the 6th
October Bridge like a 96-kph kangaroo. The driver conducts an emergency landing
manoeuvre and we touch down a split hair behind the bumper of a disgruntled bus
that blurts out a brooding pall of smoke.
The G-force
brought about by our rapid deceleration gives me an unwanted centre-parting,
not to mention a facelift (now, I’ve got to go back to my plastic surgeon to
get some more deconstructive surgery done! Damn!)
Also, thanks
to a loose bolt, I find myself on a backseat in an innovative yoga position.
Through the irregularly shaped frame of my legs, I observe the driver’s face
with a crystal clear clarity in that endless moment that separates the humdrum
hum of safety from the boom of certain doom. A sneer is stretched tightly
across his sweaty face; his hands are locked firmly around the steering wheel.
He slams down
hard on the brakes and the car swerves violently. His head swings towards his
shoulders like a shampoo commercial produced by Hammer Horrors: the pleasant
smile is replaced by an agonised sneer; the stream soft, wavy hair is replaced
by a shower of salty sweat and blizzard of dandruff. His seatbelt, wrapped
tautly around his ample gut, whips out of its catch and lashes him on the
cheek.
There is a
moment of mind-rending total silence and frozen animation in which our souls
try to figure out if they are still wedded to our bodies or if they got khul’a;
our racing hearts miss a long beat and trip on the fifth hurdle. Filled with
gratitude at being spared, I meditate while the driver lunges out of the cab
and struts around in a celebratory dance – the cars held up on the bridge join
in the festivities with a mad symphony of honking horns.
In my elevated
state, I float above the traffic, which loses its essence and takes on a film
reel quality as we embark on a manic journey through time. The Cairene
conception of time and space is rather elastic and that of motion is rather
fluid. That’s why you can hop back from 26th July to 15th
May and surge forwards to 6th October in the space of four
kilometres.
Date: 23rd
July 2000
Time: 7:48:52 pm
Place: A rooftop on
Tahrir Square
There he stands,
perched awkwardly and dangerously on the ledge. His face is a ghastly
fluorescent white that darkens to a demented neon red – back and forth, back
and forth. There is an undercurrent of electric urgency in the air. I can hear
a buzz of diodes.
Kaydee
readies himself for a 10-storey drop. I know I have to discharge the air. If I
don’t tread carefully, I will trigger off the booby trap. I call out his name.
He turns his head and, despite his despair, he is obviously touched that the
Guru of Shababia should come in person to dissuade him. I ask him what happened
in order to distract him from his resolve. I glimpse the enormous, dark behinds
of the long barricade of fluorescent signs that stand guardian over the
corporate realm that stretches westward.
“I’ve lost my
literary integrity. Why did they have to do it? I can’t go on!” he says
despondently. Holding back a sob, he turns to resume his interrupted plan. His
legs bend slightly and tense in preparation for his final flight to freedom in
Liberty Square 35 metres down below. So much for distraction tactics.
“Wait!” I
implore him. A young man in threadbare pyjamas comes out of his little concrete
room (one of the multitude, battery-like tenements that make up the sprawling
rooftop shanty town that straddles Cairo from atop) to see what all the
excitement is about.
I approach
the edge cautiously. The road below is swimming and I feel the sensation that I
am about to topple off. I pull my head up, take a deep breath and focus on the
phallic fingers up to the CIA that stands proud and erect in the form of a
lotus reed.
Next to the
tower, I see a young moon rising to take its throne in yellowed splendour. I am
incapacitated by an express train of nostalgia. Luna! My effervescent love.
Where have you been all these months? She still hasn’t returned to take me to
the cleaners as she so determinedly promised. She wasn’t drinking champagne
with her Italian mother, Bianca Nero, who was sitting out in her vineyard
singing a solemn ballad to her grapes in her soprano voice, urging them to grow
sweet, when I called.
She wasn’t on
her Icelandic father, Tostig Johanessen’s farm, checking that the fish were
laying their eggs punctually, either. In fact, she had dissolved like a grain
of salt in the oceans of humanity.
I am overrun
with melancholy. I check myself. I have more pressing demands to see to. There
she is. Floating by the moon. I know it is an illusion, a mere apparition, but
I feel her irresistible tug luring me. A luminous beam leads from the rooftop
to her. Hypnotised, I venture forward. I am about to step on it when it starts
spiralling around crazily. Kaydee tackles me to the ground just in the nick of
time.
“Haflatoun!”
he bemoans, “Why do you always have to steal the show? Even in death you have
to surpass me.”
“But…” I
begin to protest, then, realising the futility of my protests, I refrain.
Instead, “The ruse worked, didn’t it? I risked myself in order to save your
precious neck. If that’s sweeping the carpet from under you, I’m sorry. Go
ahead, die!” I lie. We sit in silence under a soft drink waterfall (I won’t
mention which one as I refuse to succumb to the tide of commercialism sweeping
through art, literature and journalism) that flows gently and constantly from a
neon bottle overhead.
Kaydee curls
up dejectedly in a foetal position. I put my arm around his shoulder in a
comforting gesture of comradeship and compassion. “Orifices and what comes out
of them are objecti non gratae. They took it out and put me in it.”
I try to help
him gain some perspective on the matter by telling him of my own traumatic
demise.
The toilet,
my seat of inspiration, realm of reflection and workshop of genius, is
obviously not a place frequented by editors and they appear to be ignorant of
or ignore what goes on in there. Their reactions to perfectly ordinary bodily
functions would suggest that they are either immune to them or live in denial.
Kahka sees it as another sign of the decay of the human condition.
“It stinks!”
she deplored. “ How can we claim the intellectual high ground if we overlook
our basic instincts. Modern humanity has lost touch with nature and, by doing
so, will only bring about its early demise,” she chastised.
“If not that,
then, at the very least, constipation,” I added as an afterthought. The cause
of my personal indignation was far more immediate than the eventual doom of
mankind. How could they tamper with the words of a philosopher prince without
first holding council with him? A thread in the intricate web of my thoughts
had been mercilessly and irredeemably shorn out.
“Give me
liberty and give me death!” Kaydee screams out deliriously as he scrambles up
the scaffolding of the fluorescent sign. I am about to follow but the strap of
my sandal gets caught on the ledge. I desperately try to get myself loose.
Kaydee stands atop the bottom of the bottle like a tiny human insect – a lord
of the flies. “Liberty! Death!” he bellows and then flings himself off.
By an
accident of bad taste and a freak twist of fortune, he miraculously survives
the drop. His bell-bottomed Charleston’s fill with air and slow his descent,
while a short, rotund American tourist suffering from delayed sunstroke and
lying prostrate on the kerb, breaks his fall. Fortunately for Kaydee, he is
able to get up and simply dust himself off. Since I’m a benevolent storyteller,
the tourist got off none the worse for wear as well. In fact, Providence
positively smiled upon him. Due to the impact of the collision, he is now 6’ 2”
and as slim as a rake. He now no longer needs the cheap liposuction he has come
to Cairo for and he can pawn off the gravity boots he recently bought.
Date: July 23rd
2000
Time: 9:00 pm
Place: The
Townhouse
Otter, my
near blind Siamese, is cowering between the legs of the Michelin Man. The
saddle on his back is empty. Double-Click, Otter’s guide mouse, is nowhere to
be seen.
“Otter,
what’s the matter?” I ask him with concern. Downcast, he purrs wearily.
Suddenly, the picture begins to click into place. “Where’s Double-Click?” I ask
in alarm. He gestures limply with his ears towards the garden. I dash out.
Outside, the war-ravaged garden is in pandemonium. Double-Click, the victim of
a treacherous ambush, has his tail caught in a snare that was concealed under
the fallen red bulb of a banana tree.
Standing
among the carnage, I survey the damage: the white powdery residue left after
the detonation of arsenic bombs; caterpillar tracks, scorch marks and trampled
plants trace the aftermath of a ruthless attack waged by a battalion of adapted
Tonka tanks. I grieve over the compromised sovereignty of my own backyard.
“Damn you! I
thought we had a deal,” I wave my fists in fury. El-Pasha has done it again. In
his megalomania, he almost genuinely believes that the neighbourhood is his
personal playground and everyone else’s needs are subservient to his. For the
last few months, we have been engaged in a bitter turf war. While landscaping
his garden, his new fence was mysteriously installed a good few metres into my
yard. When I pointed this out to him, he dismissed my claim with a casual
haughtiness. I showed him the deeds to my property. He said they were worthless
because, according to family tradition, their garden actually stretched much
further. I asked him what family tradition had to do with it. He said,
“Everything.”
I appealed to
the Tenants’ Council, the local authority and the police, but they were all
afraid to get on the wrong side of him because he had a lot of friends in high
places. In principle, I am a pacifist (and a weakling at that) and I tried long
and hard to find a peaceful solution, but even I have my limits.
One day,
El-Pasha declared outright hostilities against me. Otter had inadvertently
crossed over into his property. The damage the poor cat made was only minimal
and that was due to his inability to see clearly. He mistook El-Pasha’s leg for
a tree and sprayed it. El-Pasha was furious but, rather than give Otter a smack
round the ears, he decided to take pre-emptive measures.
Within two
days, he’d set up a no-cat’s-land between his enlarged garden and mine. He put
down barbed wire, laser sensors and electrified flowers. After much reflection
and soul-searching, I decided on counter-action. I resolved to conduct a guerrilla
war against my cruel and mighty neighbour. He, at first, retaliated with a
ruthless efficiency: he poisoned my flowers, siphoned off my water, and bombed
my civilian-gnome population with his radio-controlled fleet of Phantoms.
Following the
damage inflicted by my incursions into his garden and the inhibitive cost of
the campaign, he finally saw the wisdom of a peaceful settlement. I raised the
Toun crest high over my reclaimed territory. The Tenants’ Council agreed to
oversee the truce agreement only as long as there was no danger to any of its
members. Otter was, once again, able to walk proudly along our garden fence,
with the aid of Double-Click’s precise instructions.
Double-Click,
euphoric with the sweet taste of victory, would taunt El-Pasha’s gardener with
a flirtatious turning of her eyes as she manoeuvred Otter to take another lap
of honour along the fence.
I look down
at the incapacitated form of Double-Click and am filled with a burning rage in
the pit of my stomach. This is a declaration of outright war. My prize
guide-mouse, Otter’s indispensable companion that I had picked up in the fabled
lands of Sind from a legendary mouse train who had taught her to talk and
befriend cats, has been desaddled and demeaned.
I ride on the
tail end of my fury and it drops me off in the bedroom where I smear a generous
helping of black shoe polish on to my face. I put on my camouflage pants, khaki
shirt and engineer boots. I slip on my snooker gloves and retrieve my secret
weapon – a high-powered sling equipped with a night-sight – from its velvet
in-laid leather case. I clip my CD-Man to my belt and slip on the earphones.
As I go out
into the garden, I mask my face in a black balaclava. I am ready for my daring
night raid into enemy territory. I press play and the Mission: Impossible theme
tune blares into my ears. I take a circuitous route that would baffle any
onlooker who couldn’t hear the music. I prance about with long sporadic strides,
looking dramatically around me in all directions with the alertness of a hawk.
I snip the
barbed wire with my clippers and get ready to straddle the wall. I survey the
paranoid security system installed in the garden. “Haflatoun, this mission, if
you should choose to take it, could be Armageddon (and you know what a
formulaic blockbuster that was and we have our artistic integrity to guard). If
that should happen, we shall, of course, disavow any knowledge of your
existence. Good luck. This column will self-destruct in 30 seconds.”
This piece appeared in the July 2000 issue of
Egypt’s Insight magazine.
ã2004 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.