Episode IV
When
Titans walked the earth
Date: 3 September 2000
Time: Early evening
Place: Toun House
Everybody seems to be out of town. Kaydee is in
some private, secluded oasis with his woman. He has gone to visit the temple of
Aphrodite, where he will pay homage to the priesthood of Venus and Eros to gain
their blessing. Then he will go on a gruelling trek to climb Mount Lovanon,
where he and his lady will undergo a heart bypass followed by a heart
transplant within the sacred altar of Love.
Kahka is on a busman’s holiday defying
bureaucracy. She started off by picketing the Mugamaa. Now she and fellow
protesters are besieging the EU buildings in Brussels. Next, it’s on to New
York and the ultimate in world bureaucracy. On the way, she will stop at
insecticide factories and chant her now famous slogans: “Don’t poach the roach”
and “Beauty is in the beholder’s eye. Roaches think you’re ugly but you don’t
die.”
As for Otter, he’s decided it’s mating season.
He’s persuaded Double-Click to navigate him during this escapade. This is not
the wisest move he could’ve made. How could he take that poor little mouse out
amongst the wild city cats? If you’d excuse the confused metaphor: it’s like
setting the cats amongst the mouse.
Herriditoz has suggested that my biography
needs spicing up. Apparently, being an off-the-wall philosopher is not enough;
I need to become something of a womaniser, because that’s what sells books.
Herriditoz himself has graduated from being my silent chronicler to being my
agent, without my consent or agreement. Anyway, sales figures don’t bother me
and I told him as much, adding, in no kind terms, that he should stick to the
business of recording history not influencing it.
He countered that the higher my sales figures,
the more my ideas would proliferate to the masses because more people would
read them. I had to concede that he had a good point. “What about Luna?” I
implored. He told me that I had to forget her because she was bringing me
nothing but misery and that the sooner I admitted that she was never coming
back, the better. I begged to differ, but he was able to force my hand.
So it was with great reluctance and distaste
that I made way to meet a visiting world-famous playboy, the ex-rocker ‘Drop
Dead’ Ted, who had given up music to play women full time. He had come to
present a speech to congratulate the new president of the God’s Gift
Association. The ex-president, the current president’s ex-father, had met with
a sudden and unfortunate death. His failing health meant that each encounter
with his young and virile wife was a life-endangering experience. After one such
encounter, he was rushed to hospital all rigid with an ecstatic look on his
face that had only half-turned into a grimace when he expired.
The frail and weltering president had, during
his term in office, so come to dominate the GG and he had consolidated his hold
on power to the extent that he came to be referred to by the Association’s
publicity apparatus as God’s gift to the God’s Gift Association. His authority
was so undisputed that, upon his death, the GG’s board called an unprecedented
meeting to declare the beloved leader’s son their next president.
Date: 3 September 2000
Time: Late that evening
Place: Somewhere in Zamalek, Cairo
I have been wondering around Zamalek for
three-quarters of an hour trying to find the restaurant in which we are supposed
to meet. I have lost the scrap of paper on which I wrote the address. I am
about to give up when I remember a Drop Dead quote I once read in a fanzine, “I
have this sort of, you know, magnetic auu-ra, this kinda, you know, animal
attraction, or may be it’s just my aroma. I just dunno but, whenever I walk
down the street, women just faint.”
A plan hatches in my head and lots of little
tac-chicks run loose.
By now desperate to find him, I decide to pay
full credence to his rather far-fetched claim and take it at face value. I
wander around in search of a trail of fallen damsels. I am close to giving up
the endeavour when, suddenly, I hit on a bonanza. Down a dark and narrow
cobble-stone alley-way, I see a heap of incapacitated silhouettes. I wonder to
myself if this could be the aftermath of Drop Dead’s legendary “auu-ra”.
On closer inspection, I find that men also
count among the fallen. I experience a sombre sinking sensation in my heart.
Unless! Could it be? No!? I try to kickstart my failing heart and reignite my
will to continue my quest. I hear screams coming from further ahead. Hope
flares up in my bosom as I realise that the pandemonium is probably being
caused by DD’s travelling fan club.
I set off towards the source of the commotion.
Contrary to my expectations, I find an enormous crowd of guests fleeing a
normally quiet and subdued restaurant. They are bottle-necked at its narrow
doors. They are trying desperately to evacuate the premises: some have fallen
and are being trampled underfoot.
Those that make it out on the street collapse
on the ground, panting, gasping, their bodies squirming as they try to
revitalise their oxygen-deprived lungs. “Gas,” coughs a phlegmatic young man
wearing a loosened tie as he slides down the front of my shirt. He almost
undresses me as he grabs onto my shirt, and then trousers, to keep upright. I
jettison him off my feet and head towards the back door to investigate the
cause of the gas leak.
In the kitchen, I wet a dishcloth and wrap it
around my nose and mouth. Keeping low, I dash into the main restaurant area,
weaving my way through the incapacitated bodies of fallen chefs and waiters.
Apart from the emptiness and the odd fallen body, there is nothing immediately
amiss. Light-headed and leaden-footed, I know that I don’t have a moment to
lose. I rush upstairs to the bar area.
Drop Dead is sitting at the bar spraying
himself with a lethal concoction contained within a perfume bottle. On the stool
beside him is an attractive but rather unconscious young lady in a fetching
black evening number. Drop Dead lifts her face out of the cheese dip and brings
it gently to rest in a more comfortable position on the surface of the bar. I
approach.
Morose, he sigh pityingly as if to say: “Poor
creature! How could I expect you to resist!?” In narcissistic reverence, he
raises the bottle to sweeten the air around the shrine of supermortal sexuality
that is his body.
Before he can let loose another deadly squirt
that would leave nothing standing in its wake, I Bruce Lee the bottle out of
his hand and Jackie Chan it into the sink, where it flows harmlessly away. I
leave him to give full vent to his tantrum and, while he asks the empty bar who
the hell the freak is, I open the windows.
The air clears and the wind goes out of his
sails. I go behind the deserted bar and mix us a couple of drinks. Removing the
dishcloth from around my face, I take a deep breath and introduce myself.
A dozen or so bottles (each) into our argument,
I begin to see his point, although, admittedly, my vision, by this stage, had
lost much of its sharpness. From my new vantage point, the co-ordinates of
which lay, peculiarly, somewhere between the stool, the floor, Drop Dead and
the lower third of the bar.
Whether or discussion was becoming more
abstract or absurd, only the booze can tell.
My recollection of what ensued is somewhat
fractured. All I can remember through the murky mists and muddy waters is that
DD was trying to cure me of Luna by employing shock tactics. When all that
produced was a bloody mouth, he tactfully changed tact.
He, then, tried to make me see the sense of
finding pastures new, where I could graze at leisure on the lush vegetation.
When that also failed to obtain the required result, he decided to take
affirmative action. That’s not to suggest that he was going to take the bull by
the horns. By no means. Instead, he became my self-proclaimed shepherd who was
going to lead me out of the plains of soppy love and deliver me to the fertile
Valley of Lust.
However, my shepherd’s bearings were not at
their finest and we only got as far as the third table before tripping over a
discarded waiter who, for some mysterious reason, hadn’t regained consciousness
yet. Our lights were also extinguished as we descended into the abyss to find
the waiter.
Drop Dead’s scheme, I am more or less certain,
failed to work its intended magic. I woke up this morning with nothing more
than a bottle in my arms and a splitting headache for company. My resolve is
also none the weaker. I am at the airport now about to board my flight to
Amsterdam where I will embark on my Herculean voyage across Europe to find my
beloved. Luna, your lunatic is on his way.
This episode appeared in the September 2000
edition of Egypt’s Insight Magazine.
ã2006 K. Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website
is the copyright of Khaled Diab.