Chapter 22: A man is tutored
On Samhain in 1963 Kaa was in Lebanon. Fu’ad Chehab was in power, coup behind him, Muslims supporting him despite his Maronite Christianity. Semitics swarmed around Kaa’s pale, tall form. Imams sang calls to prayer from the minarets of mosques, and Allah was on everyone’s lips.
Kaa wore ecru pants and long-sleeved shirt, a wide-brimmed hat fouling his hair but protecting his skin from the brutal rays of the middle Eastern sun. He was sitting in the local equivalent of a stoa, a covered walkway with tables from a tea house impeding traffic. He’d been sniffing after a Flemish archaeologist by the name of Shirley, of all things, who sadly had decamped to Damascus, caramel skin and erudite mind going with her before he had done more than say hello. Any pretense of his seductive approaches being infallible was, sadly, disproven yet again. Of course, time was on his side and Damascus was not far away.
A demitasse of tea sweetened with sugar and soured with lemon sat beside his notepad. His entries today were of illicit dealings he’d noted as potentially valuable, his mission in the country not due to the archaeologist but to a request to investigate a set of interlocking corporations and sects that appeared to be removing rather more wealth from the country than they were creating. Shirley was merely a delightful bonus, at least until the sad decamping.
A flash of colour caught his eye. He turned his head to follow it, saw what appeared to be an emerald parakeet, not indigenous as far as he knew, flitting across the square and down an alley. Likely some colonialist’s folly turned to invasive species.
Tea empty, notes made, he stood, dropped coins beside the cup and headed for a certain office that had become of interest, a kilometer away down winding alleys. He arrived, perched on a low wall, willed that those passing by would be uninterested in what they saw, waited.
Time passed, the office remained unoccupied. An emerald gecko traipsed up the wall and onto its top, looked at him, or at least in his direction. Will and members of the lizard family didn’t always connect, he’d found. It was a beautiful shade of green, and its symmetry was unnerving. It darted away, and he raised his eyes to the office in time to see a very interesting person enter. Things were looking up.
Later, he sat in a restaurant decorated with an icosahedral motif, damp sounds flowing from the fountain, the smell of Winston in the air. A lamb pilaf sat in front of him, intense emerald flecks of parsley setting off the white of the rice, the richness of the lamb. Each mouthful had been a sensual delight, the crisp greens complementing the fats and simple textures of the meal. A thought wandered through his mind, then wandered out the other side, perhaps attracted to the smell of burning herbs.
He went to bed alone, had vivid dreams of emerald insects, emerald fish, emerald walls and skies and clouds. He awoke in the morning bemused, wondering where his obsession with the colour had come from.
Breakfasting on dates and more sweetened tea on the veranda of the guest house, the blare of a horn caught his attention. A small Isuzu truck was honking at a man pulling a cartload of baskets. The truck was emerald. He blinked. Still emerald.
His day continued, investigation trending to plan. He encountered more emerald geckos and birds, threads of emerald in carpets, flashes of emerald out of the corner of his eye that he couldn’t find when he turned to look.
He decided that a few days out of the city were necessary for both his plans and his colour sense. He haggled in the market for supplies: a tent of sorts, water, dried goat meat, dates and a backpack. He rented a small truck and with somewhat vague directions set out for an oasis in the desert a few tens of kilometers away.
Except for an emerald heat mirage on the horizon, the sand and remained mercifully sepia-tinged. He was beginning to wonder which of his former follies might have brought about this visual hallucination, if it were the entry to some early form of dementia. He shivered at the last thought; he loved having a mind, loved the use of it, required it for his work and his play. To lose his mind would be to lose everything.
He thought back to his childhood school, wondered where the radioactive plumes from Japan went after the bombings, wondered if fallout had reached Quezon, wondered what colour the flashes of explosions were.
He slowed for a herd of goats, was offered hashish by the goat herder, haggled and took a small chunk wrapped in a palm leaf with him into the desert.
He wondered if the embryo of a cancer was forming in his skull, pressing against his optic nerves, wondered if his excesses of lust had led to an unfortunate disease he’d never heard of, wondered if his exercises of will to alter the world to his liking were forcing him down a path of mental aberration.
Thankfully, the appearance of the turn off for the oasis arrived to interrupt his increasingly green-tinged anxieties. The rutted track required his attention, the tiny Japanese truck requiring careful steering, shifting and judicious swearing to keep moving forward. He arrived at the oasis, nearly having collided with close set palm trees, large boulders and one ancient ruin of a stone wall.
The water of the oasis was emerald. A family of Cape Hares looked up at his arrival, grey-brown bodies with white-rimmed, black tipped ears. And emerald eyes. No Thumper from the animated movie, these were rangy, gaunt creatures of the desert, and with their brilliant eyes, somewhat frightening. He doubled checked. They were eating grass, not small animals. He blinked, breathed, calmed himself.
He set up camp beside the pool of cool and delicious if absurdly coloured water. A path led off and following it, he came upon more ruins, these ones vaguely religious in nature. He tipped a little water and left a date in tribute to the ancient builders, whoever they had been, whatever they had believed. The sun was setting as he returned to his camp. It flashed emerald as it fell behind the horizon. He shook his head.
Sleep came quickly, and with it fevered dreams of flesh, dark and flowing hair and emerald eyes, lined with kohl. He awoke sweating in the cool air, slipped back into more dreams of skin and fingers and emerald eyes.
His eyes opened in the morning. He heard splashing from the pool, a melodic voice in a high-register singing a vaguely familiar song, one he’d heard from the radio in town. He slipped into his camp robe, stepped out of the tent.
She turned to look at him a smile on her plump lips, high breasts dewed with water, emerald eyes flashing in the morning sun. She walked out of the pool toward him, slowly, gracefully, stalking him. He was transfixed, held paralyzed by her eyes. She walked up to him, slid a hand behind his neck and pulled his mouth to hers.
Later, as he was rubbing her back on the cot in the tent, she told him something of what she had done and how, of her djinn magic, of how she had induced the visual hallucinations which had driven him to her, led him to her, inflamed him for her. She was no mis-termed genie of popular imagination, no safe sweetie pie, but a desert spirit of flame and lust. She had the trick of transmogrification. She had been the gecko on the wall, the parakeet in the air and a Cape Hare doe, lean and furred.
He had thought he was experienced and knowledgeable in the ways of man and woman, but she had seduced a thousand travelers from a hundred countries under the desert skies over her millennia. She shaped his enthusiasm, molded his talent, trained his innate gifts. She became a dozen women over the days they lingered beside the oasis, as well as chimerical creatures of lust and magic. They played alert, half asleep, minds fuzzed by hashish, at all hours of day and night. He was striped from her claws, earned rewards for erotic deeds done well and diligently.
They returned to the city, he rolled her into his plans, they executed a delightful deceit, shifting money into Kaa’s sphere of influence, but also back into the country, collapsing the short-term profits of the illicit amalgam he had been looking at.
Laughing, they slipped off to Beirut, spent a fraction of the new funds on enjoying the nightspots, the restaurants and especially the massive bed and bath in their suite in the Phoenicia hotel.
And then, one morning, he awoke, inflamed already with desire for her. And she was gone. And so was his recently acquired wealth. But she left behind the knowledge, the learning, the experience. She left him richer and poorer simultaneously. He considered it a fair exchange, but was devastated that the lessons had ended so soon, so abruptly.
The shoe that he had worn so often was securely on the other foot.
