Which Way to Mecca, Jack?

  The villager eyed me suspiciously, and the others hushed one another and watched. “But is taste like hommos?” asked Araby’s answer to Philo Vance. It was a shrewd question, and as my eyebrows came unglued from my sweaty tension, there was only one answer open to me. “For God and Cold War!” I murmured, and dipping two fingers into the bowl, I shut my eyes and tasted to the full. I opened my eyes immediately. The phosphorus tasted like garlic!

  “Good?” asked the villager.

  “Good!” I said, joyously punching him in the stomach and offering him the bowl. He tried a lick, and then held up his arm: “Good!” he shouted, and the crowd shouted with him. They left soon afterwards, and I picked up my eyebrows and exhaled.

  Five minutes later the Ambassador arrived. “Hello, Blatty,” he said. “Didn’t expect to see you down here.”

  “Ah—just doing a little publicity on the exhibit,” I said.

  “Oh? Seems rather quiet. Not too many people around. Let’s get some zip into those publicity releases, eh, Blatty?”

  “You bet, sir.”

  “Good fellow,” he smiled, and moved on. I walked out into the street with a high heart and a taste of garlic in my mouth. At the entrance, I saw the boy.

  vi

  Dark-eyed, barefoot and slender, and dressed in a torn black shirt and ragged trousers, the eleven-year-old was hawking penny packs of Chiclets just outside the UNESCO main entrance. I stopped to stare at him, and as I did, the thin gauze of remembrance fell across a memory twenty years old, a memory of myself straggling along Park Avenue, helping my mother peddle quince jelly. There, but for an immigration quota, go I! I thought.

  I approached the boy. “How much for a Chiclet?” I asked.

  He looked up at me. “You American?”

  “Ae, ana Amerkani.”

  His eyebrows rose a full inch. “You American, you speak Arab?” he gasped.

  “Ae.”

  His smile was dazzling. “Me speak American,” he said. “All time speak American.”

  “I gave a little laugh. “Addeish lil kawgummi?” I asked.

  He frowned. “Please. Speak wis me American. I make practice.”

  “Practice? Why, are your mama and papa taking you to America someday?”

  A child’s sadness came into his eyes. “No. I doan sink. My Papa—he no wanna go. He sink America all time rush-hurry, American all time very funny peepul.”

  They’re funny, all right, I thought. And if you want to go to America, sonny, either tattoo some freckles on your nose or get set for a career in the second balcony. You’re not “The Type.” But to the boy I said kiddingly, “I’ll bet your papa’s name is Yusef Bikhazi.” And his eyes popped out in amazement.

  “How you know Mistah Bikhazi?”

  “I live in his building.”

  “Bil-dink?”

  “Baet,” I explained. “House.”

  “Bikhazi house? My papa live in Bikhazi house!”

  “Your papa?”

  “Yess! My papa iss Ali!”

  “Ali!”

  “Yess!”

  “Well, I’ll be darned!” I looked at him appraisingly. “What’s your name?”

  “Fuad.”

  “Why haven’t I ever seen you before?”

  “I am wis Mama in village. Some little time I come visit wis Papa.”

  “I see.” I looked at the Chiclet carton. “How much for the gum?”

  He brightened. “Fife piastre.”

  “How much for the whole box?”

  He held back a gasp. “Tree leera.” It was three times the value of his remaining stock, but I knew what he wanted. “Fifty piastres!” I came back.

  “One hunred feefty!”

  “A hundred!”

  His dark eyes gleamed slyly. “Becus you arr American—hokay!” We both smiled broadly at that, and I took his gum carton and gave him five leera. “Keep it,” I said. “And when you come visit Papa, stop by. Top floor.” I walked away and turned to wave over my shoulder. He waved back.

  “You talk my Papa we go to America!” he called out. I nodded and was gone.

  As I buzzed for the elevator in the Bikhazi building, I saw Ali poking his head out of the basement. “Ever think of going to America and getting into movies?” I called out to him. His eyes went wild and he ducked back into the basement. Maybe that meant he’d thought of it, although on the other hand, maybe it meant he hadn’t. It was hard to be sure.

  As soon as I got upstairs and into the apartment, I suddenly realized that I was all aglow inside, and not because it was Christmas. I was experiencing a nuclear stomachache! Only the hommos atoms that were causing it weren’t for peace. They were to lead me to the “brink!”

  12. Security Leak

  ONE OF the caretakers at the American University of Beirut was an old Frenchman who had been suffering from chronic dysentery for over fifteen years. A white-bearded, slender gourd of a man, he was always to be seen hurrying along some campus path to a predictable destination, and of him it was truly said: “He gave his all to Knowledge.”

  Every American “gave” in Beirut, although it was rarely ever to Knowledge. Insidious bacteria were in the air and in our yogurt, and no foreigner ever escaped a loosely persistent case of tumultuous tum-tum sometime during his first six months in the country.

  I was the exception. Because of my “nuclear hommos,” I was constipated, and while I may not have been the wonder of Siam, I was certainly the marvel of Beirut.

  My not so marvelous troubles got serious attention when, after six days without relief, I stopped in at an apothecary on Rue Bliss and asked for a mild laxative.

  “Laxative?” squealed the aged Arab druggist. “Laxative?”

  “Yes, laxative,” I said in a hushed voice, for I had no wish to advertise my condition to the other customers who were quietly padding about, fingering compounds and salves.

  The druggist looked me in the eye. Then he mutely drew out a dog-eared book from under the counter and began pawing through the pages of an Arabic-English dictionary. When his ointment-stained finger fell at last on the word he was seeking, he looked up in disawe, which is a combination of awe and disbelief. “You mean you cannot go?” he quavered loudly, and he couldn’t have attracted more attention had he shouted, “SHRIMP BOATS IS COMIN’!” for alert-eared customers were now staring wide-eyed in our direction.

  “Yes,” I whispered hoarsely, my cheeks flushing scarlet.

  “How—long?” he inquired, coming around to the front of the counter for a closer look at me.

  “Six days,” I whispered.

  His right eyebrow arched into a hairy sickle, and as he leaned back against the counter for support he inadvertently knocked over a nose-drop display, but he didn’t even bother picking up the droppers. People were crowding in closer, and, “C’mon,” I said urgently, “have you got any?”

  “Got?” he echoed dazedly. “Got?” He raised one hand to his forehead. “No. No got. Perhaps—perhaps, chawaaza, the main store…” His voice trailed off behind me as I barreled out of there in a panic, shouting “Tippecanoe and Saladin too!” in a desperate effort to distract and befuddle the customers. But the word got out.

  Now there were huddled whisperings whenever I ventured abroad into the marketplace, and as the days dragged on relentlessly, close friends took to making solicitous inquiries about my condition. At NERSC, Farhat and the other typesetters adopted the disturbing habit of laying page proofs on my desk and then standing back to regard me silently for two to three minutes before shuffling back to their compositors’ stalls. And Hassan, I noticed ruefully, was keeping his door slightly ajar so that he could monitor all movements to and from the men’s room, no doubt hoping to uncover another “fake.”

  ii

  My sleep during these nights was terrorized by nightmares and evil fantasies, and in one particularly disturbing fugue sequence, I dreamed that my actor brother Mike, who was not altogether Mike at all, but sometimes appeared as a large collie do
g, was a Hollywood director who had induced me, while under the influence of a hypnotic drug, to accept bit parts in An Affair to Remember, co-starring Carrie Nation and W. C. Fields, and Indiscreet, with Jack the Ripper. The dream got even worse, for it blended into a musical version of Hamlet, with the Prince (played by Mike) and Queen Gertrude (played by Mae West) singing “People Will Say We’re in Love.” Then somehow I wound up in a leopard skin, playing chimes, while Sigmund Freud and Calpurnia sang, “You Tell Me Your Dream.” I awoke in a fearful condition, and was precious little comforted to learn that I wasn’t the only one having weird dreams. Mama was having them too.

  There, beside my breakfast magnesia, pinkly refulgent in the Lebanese morning sun, was a letter from my mother, her second since our arrival in Beirut. I opened it, for I am nothing if not fearless.

  Will-yam, My Baybee Jesus:

  You mama wanna tell you sometin yelse. I dream about Meyer Lagardia, da Joosh man he was da presdent from New York City, he die now. I dream he wanna make movie about me. What il hell dis mean?

  I ask Etmekdjian but always he look in da lousy dream book, not da good one an I tell him shurrup, da crazy! My God, dat dopey Armenian!

  You see what mean dis dream for you Mama, or I break you neck, Will-yam.

  How you are? How da children? How dat crazy Irish girl? How you like Lebbnon? I don’ tell you, you cuckoo?

  See what mean dis about Meyer Lagardia. And tell me how he write dis letter, dat dopey Armenian. If he write lousy letter I kill him.

  Sincerely yours,

  Mama

  I gathered that Etmekdjian had cribbed the closing from a letter from his gas company, and no doubt this was somehow related to the sudden absence of spelling errors immediately following Mama’s death threat. As for Mama’s dream, I sent her the usual “most favored reading,” the one predicting the legacy of a million dollars. And as for my own dreams, nothing could banish them short of a million Carter’s Little Liver Pills.

  iii

  But even my wildest nightmare proved no match for the awesome reality that pounced upon me from dark hiding in my office on the “eleventh day.” Under the pressure of Social Consciousness, I arose from my desk at about four-thirty and shuffled into the men’s room for another try at it. So that my time would not be completely wasted, I took with me some reading material, a third carbon of a classified document marked CONFIDENTIAL. It was a strict Embassy regulation that all classified documents were to be locked in the safe before five o’clock, at which time the Marrine Guard would come around checking for violations.

  Engrossed in my reading, however, I had completely lost track of the time when suddenly my head jerked up at the sound of authoritative footsteps clacking around the front office. I heard safes and cabinet locks being rattled and tested! It was the Marine Guard! It was five minutes after five!

  “Blatty, you must be above reproach!” boomed that voice in my head, and I made another one of my famed desperation moves: I tore the document into pieces, dropped them all into the toilet, and yanked on the five-foot-long chain. As the thunderous waters came rushing through the pipes, gurgling happily in their rush to the sea, I sighed with relief, and I was about to open the door when I suddenly noticed that the toilet, in a feeble anticlimax to its powerful performance, was in the act of yielding up again one small, torn fragment of the document. I leaned over to peer more closely at it, and slowly the large, black letters C-O-N-F-I-began feeding and bubbling upwards!

  I stood petrified. The marine’s footsteps had now clacked right up to the door of the men’s room, and I heard a knocking and a voice announcing tersely: “Security check!”

  “Be right out!” I called, and then flushed again. I endured agonizing moments as the waters rushed and tumbled, only to watch horrified as, letter by letter, up again, with maddening slowness, came C-O-N-F-I-D.

  The door rattled and “I’m coming! I’m coming!” I shouted wildly, dazed and unbalanced by my circumstances. I was pretty glad, just then, that the eyes of Araby weren’t on me, although I wasn’t too sure about the eyes of the United States Marine Corps. So with one hand I covered up the keyhole, and with the other I flushed again. And again, and again, and again!

  On the sixth flush, the incriminating scrap of paper finally gurgled its last farewell, and in a wake of bubbles oozed totally into the great unknown. Elated, I was about to open the door when I suddenly realized that at last, after eleven days, I had legitimate cause to be in the men’s room!

  The Marine pounded and shouted furiously all through my triumph, which lasted several minutes.

  When I opened the door, the Marine stood quietly staring at me for several baffled moments. “Bad case, huh?”

  “Yeah—real bad,” I breathed heavily, and I felt his curious gaze on my back all the way to the outer door.

  As I stepped giddily into the street, I came upon a little Arab shoeshine boy, and I half expected him to shout, “Merry Christmas, Mr. Scrooge!” But I was immensely glad when he didn’t.

  13. The Building That Went Places

  It’s a horror movie, see, and this here Samovar Jack—that’s Jack Lemmon—well, he’s a second-generation Venusian, get me, and the Earth Council blasts him up to Venus on some kinda good will bit with them frogs up there, and crikies, Griz, you oughta get a load o’ them 3-D effects when he lands his space ship smack into this purple swamp, like. Honest, it’s a gas, a real gas! But like I’m sayin’, this here Samovar Jack character, he’s got scales and flippers and the whole shmear, see, but still he don’t dig these Venusians. Trouble is, they don’t seem to dig him so good back on Earth, either, on accounta he’s different, like. So he’s tryin’, alright, but these froggies, they’re all the time jammin’ skinned glomphus wogs into his oxygen dome, and like that, and all the time they think they’re bein’ nice to the guy, but they ain’t, see, they’re killin’ the poor sap! And this here Earth Ambassador, he keeps gettin’ corked off at the guy, an’ he’s got a spy-beam trained on him. It’s kinda psychological. And then these sinister Tweenies get inta the act. You can’t ever see ’em, get me, you just hear ’em, and baby, are those stereo set-ups wild! Anyway, these Tweenies, they’re tryin’ to make Samovar flip into space shock. Real psychological. But Jack Lemmon—I mean, Samovar Jack—well, he’s made up his mind he’s gotta cut the mustard for them screws back on Earth, and it begins to look like maybe he’s gonna squeak out of it, after all. But then comes the real gasser!…

  That’s right: here comes the real gasser.

  It was the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, and while visions of leprechauns danced through my head, my Irish wife was complaining about hot water.

  “Aliiiiiii!” Peggy was screaming out our bedroom window. “Mafi mai sukhne!” Mafi was the first word of Arabic that Peggy had learned. It means, “There isn’t any.” And there wasn’t. In fact, there hadn’t been for weeks.

  Mr. Yusef Bikhazi’s concept of what a landlord should be unto his tenants roughly coincided with the theories of a fifteenth century baron named Giles Overreach. There was little heat and less hot water, and in fits of frustration we would scream for Ali to pour more oil into the heating system. But Ali and Bikhazi had worked up an impressive little “Who’s on first?” act which they implemented during these crises. Whenever we complained to Ali, he would whimper his innocence and plead that he was under Bikhazi’s cruel orders to skimp on the oil. But when we took our grievances to Bikhazi, that artfully dodging worthy would leap all over Ali, calling him a “lying, oil-filching son of a dishonorable camel.” Ali had even learned to grovel on cue during these scenes, and sometimes Bikhazi would pretend to beat him. It was truly inspiring to see this pair working together. Either man, were he given a passport, could have commanded a ducal salary on the American stage and would indeed have given even Marlon Brando something to devil his psychiatrist about.

  On this St. Paddy’s eve, however, Ali gave no answer from his basement dwelling, and we concluded that he was probably with Bikh
azi, working up a musical version of their act in order to further divert and amuse us. But we were not amused.

  “I’ve had about enough of this frisby,” I growled at Peggy. “I’m going down to the basement. I’ll fix that damned heating system myself.” I would have asked Peggy to join me, except that she had fainted in a heap at my feet. I am not very good with mechanical objects.

  I had never been in the basement before. Against one wall, away from the boilers, was Ali’s cot, and above it was a profusion of prints of Christ. That surprised me, for I had always assumed that Ali was a Moslem. In front of the cot was a large black trunk that we had sent down to the basement for storage, and apparently Ali was using it as a dining room table: on it was some bread, a dish of goat cheese, and another dish of large, black olives. I picked up an olive: it was wet. “Come out, you Lazarushian leather!” I roared, for I suspected that Ali might be cringing behind a boiler, avoiding my just wrath.

  “Hallo!” said a small voice from above. I looked up to the basement door. It was Fuad.

  “Fuad!” I said. “Hello!”

  “You look for Papa?” He came down the stairs, and “Yes, I look for Papa,” I told him. He sat down on the bottom step. “Hot wat-ar?” he said.

  “How did you know?” I smiled.

  “Papa talk wis me.”

  “About me?”

  “Yess.” He propped his elbows on his knees, and jammed his little fists against his face. “You make for him much hollar.”

  “Well—I don’t mean anything by it, Fuad. In America things are done a little differently, and a little faster.”

  “Yess,” said Fuad. “That iss why my fazzer not like to go. To America.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yess.” We were both silent for a while, as Fuad squinted up at me accusingly. “My Papa iss good man,” he added.

  “Okay, Fuad,” I said softly. “I’ll try and do a little better for you.” He jumped up with a broad grin. “I go find Papa. He fix for you hot wat-ar!” I didn’t exactly share his optimism about this, but before I could stop him he had scampered up the stairs and was gone. I turned to the heating system and fell upon it lustfully.