Engraved on the Eye by Saladin Ahmed
“Mo! Get over here!” Eric had noticed his arrival.
Muhammad walked over to discuss his scene with Eric.
“Listen up! You’re giving your ‘we’re gonna take over the world’ speech and -”
“Yes, this is what I am wanting to ask you about, Mister Williams.” Eric’s look made Muhammad cringe at his own bad English. “I am saying what in my speech?”
“I told you before, it doesn’t matter! Until we get to the last line, you’re just background noise. Everything’s gonna be focused on Chuck. Just mumble like it’s Arabic. You don’t really have to be saying anything.”
“Yes, but…”
“Goddammit!” Eric snapped, “Just start out calm and then make it angry! Like that Ayatollah asshole.”
“Excuse me, Mister Williams.” Muhammad struggled with his tenses. “That is Iran, what you are talking about. They are not speaking Arabic there, but…”
One of the crew groaned, said “Aw, come on!”
Eric squinted at Muhammad, as if seeing him for the first time. The director lowered his voice. “Do you know what kind of schedule we’re on here? We don’t have time for you to get cute. Or to suddenly develop a fucking attitude. You understand?”
Muhammad didn’t quite understand, but he knew when to grin stupidly and say “Sorry, Mister Williams. No problem!”
Muhammad’s problematic attitude came up again at the end of his weekly English lesson/American breakfast with Ali. From an unseen television somewhere in Johnny’s Hollywood Diner, an announcer roared “IT’S A NEEEEW CAAAR!!!” Ali snapped his fingers in front of Muhammad’s face, and he realized he’d been staring into space.
“What the hell’s wrong with you today, anyhow?” Ali asked.
Muhammad blinked, tried to clear his head. “What is this word, ‘Anyhow’?”
“Not now, dude. Answer my question.”
Ali looked concerned, but Muhammad didn’t quite know what to say. “I…I do not know. Lately, I am feeling that I am in a video game,” he said in English. “In Super Mario Brothers! Every inch of ground I am gaining is a danger, a…”—what was the word?—“a…an obstacle, you understand?” Forks and plates clinked around them and greasy smells filled the air.
“Not understand. Understand. Emphasis on the stand. Enough with the English lessons, anyway.” Ali sipped his coffee and smiled in a bemused way that irritated Muhammad. “So you feel like Super Mario?” his friend asked.
“Yes!” Muhammad half-shouted in Arabic. Since I’ve left home, I’ve made it through obstacle after obstacle. Found new worlds. Overcome monsters and bottomless pits. I think I am going to rescue the princess. But then, without warning, fireballs erupt behind me and I leap without looking into a pool of lava!” Muhammad knew that he was too loud, that he was speaking too quickly, that he must sound crazy. But he found he couldn’t help himself. He’d been holding too much inside. “Yes, I leap into the lava and I’m done for. But then, it’s even worse. I’m not quite done for! Instead I find myself all the way back at the beginning of this tiresome world, facing all those obstacles over again. And I say to myself ‘there’s only so many times I can come back!’ But I can’t check the corner of the screen. How many chances do I have left?” Muhammad pounded the Formica tabletop for emphasis. “How many!?” he shouted. Then, embarrassed at last, he looked around sheepishly and fell silent.
Ali stared for a moment, dumbfounded. Then he cracked a grin, and gave Muhammad a tsk-tsk-tsk. “Have you,” he asked in English, “been dipping into my stash?”
They parted ways after breakfast, and Muhammad begged off when his friend invited him to a party that night in the Valley. There was too much going on in his head for him to try and be social.
For several years now, Muhammad had been dreaming at least partly in English. In his daydreams, too, the language’s strange words and phrases had crowded into his brain. He supposed this was only natural. But lately there had been more to it. He heard and saw certain lines from his life played over and over again in his skull. One moment they were strange and foreign, the next they were disturbingly familiar.
Sorry, Mario, but our princess is in another castle!
Today we destrrroy Amerrrica!
IT’S A NEEEEW CAAAR!!!
And somewhere behind all the blaring English he could still hear the worst sounds from home. The bullying Internal Security Forces with their American-bought uniforms and rifles. The shouted charges against his uncle, who swore before God that he had heard the voice of a jinn mocking the government.
Slander! Blasphemy! Public insult to Islam!
His uncle’s reedy Arabic, whimpering words in the public square.
In the name of God, just kill me!
The sound of his uncle’s bones being broken. The consoling words, like smokeless fire speaking, that had echoed impossibly in Muhammad’s head as he was made to watch his uncle being beaten.
Muhammad woke in the night, sometimes, with all these sounds and words insisting he listen to them, picture them. More and more often he worried that he was losing his mind.
As Muhammad walked toward his rusty Dodge, silently praying to himself that it would start again, he passed a newspaper box and a headline caught his eye.
US BOMBS LIBYA
He scanned the story as best he could through the grate. US warplanes…over 100 dead…baby daughter was slain.
Why had he looked? Muhammad took a breath and did what he always did with the news—tried to pretend he hadn’t read it. He moved on.
An American couple in their twenties was walking by, clearly enjoying the warm April morning. Before coming to the states, Muhammad had worked at kebab stands in Sweden and West Germany. There were big blonde men in those places. But there was a way of being big and blonde that only American men had. A way that somehow reminded Muhammad of a swinging fist. This man had it. He squeezed the woman beside him immodestly, smirked as he called her “Princess.” She was blonde, too. Thin in a way that seemed unhealthy to Muhammad’s eyes. He felt ashamed for being aroused by this unhealthiness, and looked down as they passed.
Though he couldn’t say why, he stopped walking and pretended to look in a store window. Then he discreetly turned to watch the couple for a moment. The pair stood in front of the newspaper box. They didn’t notice Muhammad. They were drunk and in love and he was just one of Los Angeles’ million oily immigrants.
The woman pointed at a headline and said sad-sounding words, but Muhammad couldn’t quite make them out over the street traffic.
The man’s voice was clear. “You ask me, we should just nuke these assholes!”
The woman looked disgusted and thrilled. She swatted the man’s arm and said something Muhammad couldn’t understand.
Muhammad looked on with Eric as Artie the propmaster held up a gaudily painted bronze bowl.
“Wow, Artie, where did you dig that up?” Eric asked, smiling for the first time in days.
Artie scratched at his sizable paunch. “I got it on a lark in Egypt last year. The old-timer who sold it to me said it’d grant me a wish. But it must be all used up—I keep trying this one wish involving Madonna, but no go.” One of the cameramen chuckled obscenely. “Anyway, I had to paint over it to make it show up on camera. A few bucks for a can of gold spray paint and now we got our evil artifact!”
Eric looked genuinely pleased. “Well, Artie, maybe you’re worth half a shit after all. We need to save every fucking penny if we’re going to afford Mister Bigshot Action Star’s goddamned salary!”
“Where is Chuck, anyway?” someone behind Muhammad asked.
Eric made a disgusted noise. “Are you kidding me? We’ve got him for six days next week and that’s it. We’ve got to shoot around him as much as we can.”
Muhammad turned to go practice his getting-shot-nineteen-times-while-Lieutenant-Snake-says-a-one-liner face in the mirror, but Eric grabbed his arm.
“So, General Akmed, here’s your prop. Hey! Maybe you can actuall
The metal was like none Muhammad had ever touched before. Somehow warm and cool, smooth and rough all at the same time. Under the cheap gold paint embossed Arabic wreathed the bowl.
But it was an odd Arabic. Old and weirdly vowelled, like the language of the Qu’ran read in a warped mirror. Boyhood religion lessons came back as Muhammad pieced together the strange phrases and read silently.
O believer! Know that this bowl holdeth a servant of Solomon, son of David, God’s prophet, to whom God did grant dominion over winds and birds and jinn.
O believer! Thou hast seen kin-blood spilled. Thou hast crossed the endless western oceans. Thou hast followed the setting sun farther, to a land of disbelievers where the air itself doth choke and the earth itself doth tremble. Thou hast been watched by God and Solomon’s servant.
O believer! As you stand in this land, hold this bowl and recite! Then shall ye reap the knowledge of Solomon! Then shall ye sip from the benevolent cup of Almighty God!
Muhammad’s mind raced with unfathomables. This old engraving was describing L.A.! Inside his mind, the words repeated themselves in a voice not his. A voice not human. The same smokeless fire voice that had spoken to him at his uncle’s trial all those years ago.
Below the weird words was engraved the traditional Islamic declaration of faith, as familiar to Muhammad’s eye as the preceding lines were strange. He gripped the bowl, felt a feverish madness closing in on him. By sheer force of habit he recited the declaration in Arabic.
“There is no God but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.”
Muhammad only half-heard Eric’s barked demands for a translation. Something strange—something impossible—was happening, and he stood transfixed.
Clouds of opalescent smoke rolled forth from the bowl and roiled around him. Muhammad let go of the bowl with a yelp, but it just floated there in midair. He thought his heart might beat its way out of his chest. The clouds billowed out to fill the studio and peals of thunder shook the building. To Muhammad it sounded as if the universe were being cracked open like an egg.
Had he finally lost his mind? No…no, Eric and the crew were running around, screaming terrified things!
A fanged face of shimmering smoke began to take shape before Muhammad. A chillingly familiar voice like a thousand harps strummed by sword-blades seemed to scream behind his eyes.
ONE WISH, O SON OF ADAM! SPEAK IT CAREFULLY!
Muhammad’s mind raced with a hundred horrible thoughts. He tried to ignore the inconceivable chaos around him. Tried to control his thinking. What must he do? What must he say?
Video game music, the cruel words of passers-by, old stories of the jinn, his wounded uncle’s whimpers, the sound of warplanes—all of it hammered at his skull as he tried to clear his mind of strange language. In the name of God, just kill me! echoed in his head in Arabic. Smoke billowed and the studio roof rained plaster.
In spite of himself, bits of English slipped all at once from his lips.
“…princess…”
“…destrrroy Amerrrica!”
“A NEEEEW CAAAR!!!”
Muhammad wasn’t quite sure which bit had slipped first.
Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride
“…and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.”
—Qu’ran 5:32
The toughest man I ever met? That’s an easy answer to give, but a tricky tale to tell.
Mister Hadj was from the same place as my rattlesnake of a Pa. Araby, or someplace like, though I don’t rightly know the name since neither him nor my Pa ever said a blasted word about the Old Country. You’d ask and ask, and all you’d get back was a look as hard as rocks. No use digging after that.
I’ve ridden with good men and bad men, but I never rode with a man like Mister Hadj. That wasn’t his proper name. Just a way of calling the old man respectful-like. My Pa taught me that, if I ever met a man from the Old Country, to call him ‘Hadj.’ Damn near the only thing that sonuvabitch ever taught me.
Anyhow, a good few years back now, when I was a young, full-of-hisself bounty hunter, I fell in with Mister Hadj in the Black Hills. We rode together about a year. He was a little leather-brown knot of a man with a moonlight-white beard, and he took an immediate and powerful shine to me on account of my Pa’s being from Araby.
Now, understand, I’m a bastard. I carry my momma’s name—O’Connor. But the way I look—little darker than the average man, I know, and you can see the hatchet nose—well, I get taken for a lot of things. South of the border, I’ve fibbed that I was half-Mexican. Lived a summer trading with the Cheyenne, claiming to be part redman. Even got chased outta town once when I winked at the wrong girl—they was sure as could be that I was a mulatto!
It can be hell, sometimes, being different things to different folks. But it can be right useful, too.
Well, Mister Hadj musta smelled the Old Country in my blood, somehow. Like I say, he took a shine to me. And my knowing how to call him respectfully seemed to seal it for him. I can’t say I ever understood it, but Mister Hadj was the kind of man you wanted on your side, so I wasn’t about to complain.
For what it’s worth, I was the last man ever saw him alive.
The last time I rode with Mister Hadj, we was in a little shit town in Texas, trailing Parson Lucifer’s gang. Old Parson Lucifer was an ex-preacher, mad as a rabid dog. Said he took the name ’cause he was “part blessed and part damned, like any man.” Can’t say I ever saw the blessed part, though.
Like I said, the man was out of his blasted mind. Anything ruthless or nasty you might have heard about his gang was probably the plain truth. That three-day-slow murder of the blacksmith and his wife in Deadwood, done with their own smithing tools? That weren’t no tale. The widower sheriff of Redemption and his baby boys getting their ears chopped off and force-fed to them? Parson Lucifer’d done that, too.
We were in the employ of the town of Crossblood, where even the old Sunday school teacher was foaming at the mouth to see Parson Lucifer and his boys strung up. They’d lost a lot to that gang. Most of the gang had been caught before we ever got hired—and what got done to ’em wasn’t none too pretty, neither.
But Parson Lucifer and his two sons were still out there.
Well, one and a half of his sons, anyway. To hear it told, two sheriff’s deputies had fired three shots each into his youngest, Shambles. Wasn’t nothing left but a bloody pulp shaped like a man. But Parson Lucifer and his eldest, James, went through the trouble of killing two more men just in order to haul the younger boy’s body away.
Now, Mister Hadj and me wasn’t the only hunters hunting these dogs, but it was us that found ’em. Rather, it was him that did. By serenading the rocks.
See, that old man could sing. I don’t think he knew what half the words meant. But when Mister Hadj started in on them cowboy songs—well, as sure as I’m standing here, when that man got to crooning a tune he made the earth itself cry. This ain’t just me tale-telling, you hear? I seen tears fall from big red rocks when the old man hummed. Heardstones weep as they parted before him.
So when Mister Hadj said that a stone in the road told him where to find Parson Lucifer, I didn’t doubt it. And though it still spooked me, I didn’t flinch when he sang softly to a great big cliff-face until it wept and opened us a passage to a perfect ambush perch.
Y’all ain’t got to believe me for it to be truth.
I never learned Mister Hadj’s Christian name, but tell the truth I don’t think he was a Christian. Not to say he wasn’t living Christianly, you hear—when we were down Mexico way, that man’d toss his last peso at the first beggar what asked. But I don’t think he’d ever touched a Bible in his life. And Sunday to him was just another day.
Every evening, he’d roll out this funny little rug. Then he’d turn his back to the setting sun, bow down and say some’a his words. Heathen praying, far as I could te
“You gonna do that every night?” I’d asked him early on.
“Should be more,” he’d said in that rocks-and-honey voice. And that was all he’d ever say on the matter.
No, it wasn’t nothing Christian. But my momma taught me that another man’s religion was like another man’s wife—none of my goddamn business. That old gal taught me a lot of lessons, but sticking to my own business was just about the best of ’em.
Granted, he ain’t seemed to like words a whole lot. Never said much more than “Yup,” “Nope,” “I reckon,” and “Good, huh?” Once in a while, when he’d get real mad, he’d start to talking his Old Country talk, sounding like…like a man clearing his throat with flowers.
I suppose it would have drove a lot of men mad, riding with a man as quiet as that. And I can’t say that, once in a while, I didn’t wish Mister Hadj a bit more social. But I’ve always liked my quiet. Ain’t nothing in this world drives me up the wall like riding with a man who keeps on talking when there ain’t nothing to say.
I always knew Mister Hadj was there, and that was all I needed to know. By my hope of being saved, I’ll tell you I never saw a man as good with a gun. It wasn’t natural, the things that old man could do with a Navy Colt or a Winchester. You’ll think I’m talking tall, but I’d swear it before the Almighty hisself: I seen Mister Hadj shoot the buck teeth off a jumping jackrabbit. Seen him shoot another man’s bullets out the air. Seen him shoot more than a couple men, too. We made a over a dozen bounties in our year together. And not all of ’em were alive. Not by a clean sight.
We was spying on Parson Lucifer and his son from our hiding place high in the cliff-face when Mister Hadj, for reasons knowed only to him at the time, insisted we wait till the next day to nab the bastards. Well, I didn’t want to hear that. I was a foolish young man in those days. Hot and headstrong, with even more to prove than your average prairie boy.