George Effinger - When Gravity Fails

James Bond laughed softly. “Every time you see a well-setup European in one of your grimy, quaint rumshops, you think you can come along behind and relieve him of his pocketbook. Well, my friend, sometimes you choose to rob the wrong European.” He slapped me across the face, not very hard, threw me away from himself against the rough face of the wall behind me, and stared at me as if I owed him an explanation or apology. I decided he was right.

“A hundred thousand pardons, effendi .” I murmured. Somewhere in my mind arose the thought that this James Bond was handling himself a good sight better than he had when he let me escort him out of Chiri’s a couple of weeks ago. Tonight, his goddamn black comma of hair wasn’t even out of place. He wasn’t even breathing hard. There was some logical explanation for all that, too; I’d let Papa or Jacques or the I Ching figure it out: my head was throbbing too hard and my ears were chiming.

“And you needn’t bother with that ‘ effendi ’ bunk,” he said grimly. “That’s a Turkish flattery, and I still have more than one grudge against the Turks. You’re no Turk, anyway, by the looks of you.” His slightly cruel mouth gave me a slightly vicious sneer and he walked by me as if I were no threat at all to his safety or his wallet. That, in point of fact, was the plain truth. I had just had my second run-in with the man who called himself James Bond. At the moment, we each had a score of one, out of a possible two; I was in no hurry at all to play the rubber match. He seemed to have learned a lot since our last meeting, or for some reason of his own he had allowed me to chuck him so easily out of Chiri’s. I knew I was badly outclassed here.

As I walked slowly and painfully back to the Silver Palm, I came to an important decision: I was going to tell Papa that I wouldn’t help him. It wasn’t merely a matter of being afraid to have my brain wired; hell, even with it goosed from here to the Prophet’s Birthday, I was no competition for these killers. I couldn’t even follow James Bond down one goddamn block in my own neighborhood without getting my ass kicked around. I didn’t have a single doubt that Bond could have dealt more harshly with me, if he’d chosen to. He thought I was just a robber, a common Arab thief, and he merely treated me the way he treated all common Arab thieves. It must have been a daily occurrence for him.

No, there was nothing that could persuade me otherwise. I didn’t need the three days to think about it — Papa and his wonderful scheme could just go to hell.

I went back to the Silver Palm and threw down my drink in two great gulps. Over the protestations of Mahmoud and Jacques, I said that I had to be going. I kissed Heidi on the cheek and whispered a licentious suggestion in her ear, the same suggestion I always whispered; and she replied with the same amused rejection. I walked thoughtfully back to Frenchy’s to explain to Yasmin that I was not going to be a hero, that I was not going to serve higher principles than kings and princes and all the rest of that foolishness. Yasmin would be disappointed in me, and I probably wouldn’t get into her pants for a week; but that was better than getting my throat slashed and having my ashes strewn over the sewage treatment plant.

I would have a lot of explaining to do to everybody. I would have a lot of apologizing to do, too. Everyone from Selima to Chiri to Sergeant Hajjar to Friedlander Bey himself would be after my balls, but I had made my decision. I was my own man, and I wouldn’t be pressured into accepting a terrifying fate, however morally right and public-spirited they all made it sound. The drink at the Silver Palm, the two at Frenchy’s, a couple of tri-phets, four sunnies, and eight Paxium all agreed with me. Before I found my way back to Frenchy’s, the night was warm and safe and wholly on my side, and everybody who was urging me to wire my brain was stuffed down deep in a dark pit into which I planned never again to peek. They could all jam each other silly, for all I cared. I had my own life to lead.

Friday was a day of rest and recuperation. My body had been bruised and beaten by a lot of people lately, some of whom had been friends and acquaintances, some of whom I was just chafing to catch in a dark alley real soon. One of the best things about the Budayeen is the prevalence of dark alleys. They were planned purposefully, I think. Somewhere in somebody’s sacred scripture it says, “And there shall be caused to be built dark alleys wherein the mockers and the unrighteous shall in their turn have their heads laid open and in like wise their fat lips busted; and even this shall be pleasing in the sight of Heaven.” I couldn’t quote you exactly where that verse comes from. I might have dreamt it up early Friday morning.

The Black Widow Sisters had had first crack at me; various lackeys of Lutz Seipolt, Friedlander Bey, and Lieutenant Okking had caused me grief, as had their smugly smiling masters; and just last night I’d been briefly chastized by this James Bond lunatic. My pill case was now completely empty: nothing but pastel-colored dust on the bottom that I could lick from my fingertips, hoping for a milligram of help. The opiates were the first to go; my supply of Sonneine, bought from Chiriga and then Sergeant Hajjar, had been downed in rapid succession as each of my body’s movements brought new twinges and spasms of pain. When the sunnies were gone I tried Paxium, the little lavender pills that some people believe is the ultimate gift of the organic chemical universe, the Answer to All of Life’s Little Worries, but which I’m coming to the conclusion aren’t worth their weight in jackal snot. I ate them anyway and washed them down with about six ounces of Jack Daniels that Yasmin brought home from work with her. Okay, that left the full-throttle blue triangles. I didn’t really know what they’d do for pain, but I was certainly willing to use myself as a research volunteer. Science Marches On. I dropped three tri-phets, and the effect was fascinating from a pharmacological standpoint: in about half an hour, I began taking a tremendous interest in my heartbeat. I measured my pulse rate at something like four hundred and twenty-two per minute, but I kept getting distracted by phantom lizards crawling around just at the edges of my peripheral vision. I’m almost certain that my heart wasn’t really pumping that hard.

Drugs are your friends, treat them with respect. You wouldn’t throw your friends in the garbage. You wouldn’t flush your friends down the toilet. If that’s the way you treat your friends or your drugs, you don’t deserve to have either. Give them to me. Drugs are wonderful things. I won’t listen to anybody trying to get me to give them up. I’d rather give up food and drink — in fact, on occasion, I have.

The effect of all the pills was to make my mind wander. Actually, any sign of life on its part was heartening. Life was taking on a kind of bleak, pungent, really penetrating, and awfully huge quality that I didn’t enjoy at all.

On top of that, I remembered that I’d collected a couple of caps of RPM from Saied the Half-Hajj. This is the same junk that Bill the taxi driver has coursing through his bloodstream all the time, all the time, at the cost of his immortal soul. I’ve got to remember not to ride with Bill anymore. Jesus, that stuff is just really scary, and the worst part was that I actually paid cash money for the privilege of feeling so lousy. Sometimes I’m disgusted by the things I do, and I make resolutions to clean myself out. I promised, when that RPM wore off, if it ever did …

Friday was the Sabbath, a day of rest except for everybody in the Budayeen who went right back to work as soon as the sun went down. We observed the holy month of Ramadan, but the city’s cops and the mosque’s bullies let up on us a little on Fridays. They were happy to get whatever cooperation they could. Yasmin went to work and I stayed in bed, reading a Simenon I think I had read when I was about fifteen and again when I was about twenty and again a couple of other times. It’s hard to tell with Simenon. He wrote the same book a dozen times, but he had so many different books that he wrote a dozen times each that you have to read all of them and then sort them out in some kind of rational order according to a logical, thematic basis that’s always been far beyond me. I just start at the back (if it’s printed in Arabic) or the front (if it’s printed in French) or the middle (if I’m in a hurry or too full of my friends, the drugs).