George Effinger - When Gravity Fails

The three others at my table were a mixed collection. Mahmoud was a sex-change, shorter than me but broader through the shoulders and hips. He had been a girl until five or six years ago; he’d even worked for Jo-Mama for a while, and now he lived with a real girl who hustled in the same bar. It was an interesting coincidence.

Jacques was a Moroccan Christian, strictly heterosexual, who felt and acted as if he had special privileges because he was three-quarters European, therefore beating me out by a full grandparent. Nobody listened to Jacques very much, and whenever celebrations and parties were planned, Jacques learned about them just a little too late. Jacques was included in card games, however, because somebody has to be there to lose, and it might as well be a miffy Christian.

Saied the Half-Hajj was tall and well-built, rich, and strictly homosexual; he wouldn’t be seen in the company of a woman, real, renovated, or reconverted. He was called the Half-Hajj because he was so scatterbrained that he could never start one project without getting distracted in the middle by two or three others. Hajji is the title one gets after completing the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, which is one of the other Pillars of Islam. Saied had actually begun the journey several years ago, made about five hundred miles, and then turned back because he’d had a magnificent money-making idea that he forgot before he reached home again. Saied was somewhat older than I was, with a carefully trimmed mustache that he was very proud of. I don’t know why; I’ve never thought of a mustache as an achievement, unless you’d started out life like Mahmoud. Female, that is. All three of my companions had had their brains wired. Saied was wearing a moddy and two daddies. The moddy was just a general personality module; not a particular person but a particular type — he was being strong, silent, rough trade today, and neither of the add-ons could have been giving him card-playing help. He and Jacques were making me and Mahmoud richer.

These three ill-assorted louts were my best male friends. We wasted a lot of afternoons (or, during Ramadan, late evenings) together. I had two prime sources of information in the Budayeen: these three, and the girls in the clubs. The information I got from one person often contradicted the version I heard from another, so I’d long ago gotten into the habit of trying to hear as many different stories as I could and averaging them all out. The truth was in there somewhere, I knew it; the problem was coaxing it into the open.

I had won most of the money on the table, and Mahmoud the rest. Jacques was about to throw in his cards and quit the game. I wanted something more to eat, and the Half-Hajj agreed. The four of us were just about to leave the Solace and find somewhere else to have lunch, when Fuad ran up to us. This was the scrawny, spindle-legged son of a camel who was called (among other things) Fuad il-Manhous, or Fuad the Chronically Unlucky. I knew right off that I wasn’t going to get anything to eat for a while. The look on il-Manhous’s face told me that a little adventure was about to begin.

“Praise Allah that I found you all here,” he said, snapping quick glances at each of us.

“Go with Allah, my brother,” said Jacques tartly. “I think I see Him heading that way, toward the north wall.”

Fuad ignored him. “I need some help,” he said. He sounded more frantic than usual. He has little adventures fairly often, but this time he seemed really upset.

“What’s wrong, Fuad?” I asked.

He looked at me gratefully, like a child. “Some black bitch clipped me for thirty kiam.” He spat on the ground.

I looked at the Half-Hajj, who only looked heavenward for strength. I looked at Mahmoud, who was grinning. Jacques looked exasperated.

“Them bitches get you pretty regularly, don’t they, Fuad?” asked Mahmoud.

“You just think so,” he replied defensively.

“What happened this time?” asked Jacques. “Where? Anybody we know?”

“New girl,” he said.

“It’s always a new girl,” I said.

“She works over at the Red Light,” said the Cursed One.

“I thought you were banned out of there,” said Mahmoud.

“I was,” Fuad tried to explain, “and I still can’t spend any money in there, Fatima won’t let me, but I’m working for her as a porter, so I’m in there all the time. I don’t live by Hassan’s shop anymore, he used to let me sleep in his storeroom, but Fatima lets me sleep under the bar.”

“She won’t give you a drink in her place,” said Jacques, “but she lets you carry out her garbage.”

“Uh huh. And sweep up and clean off the mirrors.”

Mahmoud nodded wisely. “I’ve always said that Fatima has a soft heart,” he said. “You’ve all heard me.”

“So what happened ?” I asked. I hate having to listen to Fuad circumambulate the point for half an hour every time.

“I was in the Red Light, see,” he said, “and Fatima had just told me to bring in another couple bottles of Johnny Walker and I’d gone back and told Nassir and he gave me the bottles and I brought them up to Fatima and she put them under the bar. Then I asked her, I said, ‘What do you want me to do now?’ and she said, ‘Why don’t you go drink lye?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to go sit down for a while,’ and she said, ‘All right,’ so I sat down by the bar and watched for a while, and this girl came over and sat down next to me—”

“A black girl,” said Saied the Half-Hajj.

“Uh huh—”

The Half-Hajj gave me a look and said, “I have a special sensitivity in these matters.” I laughed.

Fuad went on. “Uh huh, so this black girl was real pretty, never saw her before, she said she just started working for Fatima that night, and I told her it was a pretty rowdy bar and that sometimes you have to watch yourself because of the crowd they get in there, and she said she was real grateful because I gave her the advice and she said people in the city were real cold and didn’t care about anybody but themselves, and it was nice to meet a nice guy like me. She gave me a little kiss on my cheek, and she let me put my arm around her, and then she started—”

“To feel you up,” said Jacques.

Fuad blushed furiously. “She wanted to know if she could have a drink, and I said I only had enough money to live on for the next two weeks, and she asked me how much I had, and I said I wasn’t sure. She said she bet I probably had enough to get her one drink and I said, ‘Look, if I’ve got more than thirty, I will, but if I’ve got less than thirty, I can’t,’ and she said that sounded fair, so I took out my money and guess what? I had exactly thirty, and we hadn’t said what we were going to do if I had exactly thirty, so she said it was okay, I didn’t have to buy her a drink. I thought that was real nice of her. And she kept kissing on me and hugging me and touching me, and I thought she really liked me a lot. And then, guess what?”

“She took your money,” said Mahmoud. “She wanted you to count it just to see where you kept it.”

“I didn’t know she done it until later, when I wanted to get something to eat. It was all gone, like she reached into my pocket and took it.”

“You’ve been clipped before,” I said. “You knew she was going to do it. I think you like being clipped. I think you get off on it.”

“That’s not true,” said Fuad stubbornly. “I really thought she liked me a lot, and I liked her, and I thought maybe I could ask her out or something later, after she got off work. Then I saw my money was gone, and I knew she done it. I can put two and two together, I’m no dummy.”

We all nodded without saying anything.

“I told Fatima, but she wouldn’t do anything, so I went back to Joie — that’s what she calls herself, but she told me it wasn’t her real name — and she got real mad, saying she never stole nothing in her life. I said I knew she done it, and she got madder and madder, and then she pulled a razor out of her purse, and Fatima told her to put it away, I wasn’t worth it, but Joie was still real mad and come at me with the razor, and I got out of there and looked all over the place for you guys.”