George Effinger: When Gravity Fails

The really strange thing was that during that whole speech, neither of the Stones That Speak came any nearer or shoved me around or broke my face for me. Papa must have given them a signal to let me have my little oration. I took another step toward him, and he lifted the corners of his mouth in a pitiful, ancient man’s attempt at a smile. I stopped short, as if I’d walked into an invisible glass wall.

Baraka . The charismatic spell that surrounds saints and tombs and mosques and holy men. I couldn’t have harmed Friedlander Bey and he knew it. He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a gray plastic device that fitted nicely into the palm of his hand. “Do you know what this is, my son?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“It is a portion of you.” He pressed a button, and the screaming nightmare that had made an animal of me, that had driven me to rend and tear Okking and Hassan, flooded my skull in its full, unstoppable fury.

I came to in a fetal position on Papa’s rug.

“That was only fifteen seconds,” he told me calmly.

I stared at him sullenly. “That’s how you’re going to make me do what you want?”

He gave me that piece of a smile again. “No, my son.” He tossed the control device in a gentle arc, and I caught it. I looked at him. “Take it,” he said. “It is your loving cooperation I desire, not your fear.”

Baraka .

I pocketed the remote control unit and waited. Papa nodded. “Let it be done,” he said again. And just like that, I was a cop. The Stones That Speak moved closer toward me. In order to breathe, I had to keep skipping a couple of feet in front of them. They squeezed me out of the room and down the hall and out of Friedlander Bey’s house altogether. I didn’t have another chance to say anything. I was standing in the street, a lot richer. I was also some kind of imitation law-enforcement agent with Hajjar as my immediate boss. Even in my worst drug-induced half-crazed nightmares, I’d never concocted anything as horrible as that.

As the word does, it got around fast. They probably knew about it before I did, while I was still recuperating and playing solitaire with the Sonneine. When I went into the Silver Palm, Heidi wouldn’t serve me. At the Solace, Jacques, Mahmoud, and Saied stared about six inches above my shoulder into humid air and talked about how much garlic was enough; they never even acknowledged my presence. I noticed that Saied the Half-Hajj had inherited custody of Hassan’s American kid. I hoped they’d be very happy together. I finally went into Frenchy’s, and Dalia set a coaster in front of me. She looked very uncomfortable. “Where you at, Marîd?” she asked.

“I’m all right. You still talking to me?”

“Sure, Marîd, we been friends a long time.” She gave a long, worried look down at the end of the bar, though.

I looked, too. Frenchy stood up from his stool and came slowly toward me. “I don’t want your business, Audran,” he said gruffly.

“Frenchy, after I caught Khan, you told me I could drink free in here for the rest of my life.”

“That was before what you done to Hassan and Okking. I never had no use for either of them, but what you did … ” He turned his head aside and spat.

“But Hassan was the one who—”

He cut me off. He turned to the barmaid. “Dalia, if you ever serve this bastard in here again, you’re fired. You got that?”

“Yeah,” she said, looking nervously from Frenchy to me.

The big man turned back to me. “Now get out,” he said.

“Can I talk to Yasmin?” I asked.

“Talk to her and get out.” Then Frenchy turned his back on me and walked away, the way he’d walk away from something he didn’t want to have to see or smell or touch.

Yasmin was sitting in a booth with a mark. I went up to her, ignoring the guy. “Yasmin,” I said, “I don’t—”

“You best go away, Marîd,” she said in an icy voice. “I heard what you did. I heard about your sleazy new job. You sold out to Papa. I’d have expected that from anybody else; but you, Marîd, I couldn’t believe it at first. But you did it, didn’t you? Everything they say?”

“It was the daddy, Yasmin, you don’t know how it made me feel. Anyway, you’re the one who wanted me to—”

“I suppose it was the daddy that made you a cop, too?”

“Yasmin … ” Here I was, the man whose pride sufficeth, who needed nothing, who expected nothing, who wandered the lonely ways of the world unappalled because there were no more surprises. How long ago had I believed that, actually been conned by it, seen myself that way? And now I was pleading with her …

“Go away, Marîd, or I’ll have to call Frenchy. I’m working.”

“Can I call you later?”

She made a small grimace. “No, Marîd. No.”

So I went away. I’d been on my own before, but this was something new in my experience. I suppose I should have expected it, but it still hit me harder than all the terror and ugliness I’d gone through. My own friends, my former friends, found it simpler to draw a line through my name and cut me out of their lives than to deal with the truth. They didn’t want to admit to themselves the danger they’d been in, the danger they might be in again some day. They wanted to pretend that the world was nice and healthy and worked according to a few simple rules that somebody had written down somewhere. They didn’t need to know what the rules were, precisely; they just needed to know they were there just in case. I was now a constant reminder that there were no rules, that insanity was loose in the world, that their own safety, their own lives, were always in jeopardy. They didn’t want to think about that, so they made a simple compromise: I was the villain, I was the scapegoat, I took all the honor and all the punishment. Let Audran do it, let Audran pay for it, fuck Audran.

Okay, if that’s how it was going to be. I thundered into Chiri’s place and threw a young black man off my usual stool.

Maribel got off a stool down at the end of the bar and wobbled drunkenly toward me. “Been looking for you, Marîd,” she said in a thick voice.

“Not now, Maribel. I’m not in the mood.”

Chiriga looked from me to the young black man, who was thinking about starting something with me. “Gin and bingara?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. That’s as much expression as she showed me. “Or tende?”

Maribel sat down next to me. “You got to listen, Marîd.”

I looked at Chiri; it was a tough decision. I went with vodka gimlets.

“I remember who it was,” Maribel said. “The one I went home with. With the scars, who you was looking for. It was Abdul-Hassan, the American kid. See? Hassan must have put them scars on him. I told you I’d remember. Now you owe me.”

She was pleased with herself. She tried to sit up straight on the stool.

I looked at Chiri, and she gave me just the merest hint of a smile.

“What the hell,” I said.

“What the hell,” she said.

The young black man was still standing there. He gave us each a puzzled look and walked out of the club. I probably saved him a small fortune.