Lance Olsen: Head in Flames

Then you met Nouredine the illegal from Morocco and this thing became that thing and everything became something else.

Blue: the sharp scent of what happens just past the farthest brink.

Laughing, Theo replied: You’re a great judge of character. You’re the heroic politician. I’m the village idiot. We should do something together sometime.

I want to show you someone who will change your life Nouredine said I want to show you something you’ll never forget.

The low avocado line of trees edging the horizon.

Britney Spears , it ripples through Theo’s thoughts.

And then one evening he took you around to hear Abou Khaled preach in back of an internet phone store in Schiedam black jacket over white djel-laba.

My eyes are sometimes emerald, sometimes hazel. It’s the oddest thing.

Theo waited more than a year after the first meeting to ferret out Ayaan’s phone number from a friend.

The fury of his Takfir sermons bolting between Dutch and Arabic.

Why are you frightened of your own shadow? the doctors at Saint-Rémy asked me.

I am a farce to be reckoned with, Theo told her.

Hey mate you eat cats and dogs?

Because it is mine, of course, I responded.

In the Catholic schoolgirl uniform with the bare midriff and gray bobby socks. The video. Yes. That one.

Khaled explaining how he began speaking to small groups in private flats and the back rooms of provincial shops like this.

The silvery snap startles the afternoon.

Blond pigtails. Pink ribbons.

How he’d fled Assad’s secular Syrian dictatorship flew to Frankfurt on a false passport how the German faggots refused to grant him asylum and so he had to look for another place to go.

The violent flinch slapping you back.

Lolita from Louisiana.

Explaining how he’d heard Holland was an easier country than Germany to operate in illicitly and so he crossed the border.

The weather happening inside my chest.

Theo caught up with her in the backseat of a New York taxi one morning. It was May. It was 2004. She was in the States to attend a friend’s wedding. Theo didn’t say hello. He didn’t apologize for the year’s radio silence. He just started talking.

Explaining how Muslims departing from the true faith are infidels who deserve to perish at the hands of believers.

The afternoon languaging around me.

It took half a block before Ayaan understood it was Theo on the other end of the line.

Muzzles.

The earsplitting gardens outside my window at Saint-Rémy.

He was going on about how he’d been invited to chair this big debate over the immigration question, only one of the participants, Abu Jahjah, who ran a group of young Arab men, said he would refuse to participate if Theo attended.

When you meet the unbelievers strike them in the neck the Quran urging.

Acute mania with hallucinations of sight that have caused you to mutilate yourself , the director explaining to me upon admission.

Can you imagine such a thing happening in Holland? Theo asked Ayaan, aghast. Who did this to our dumb bitch of a country?

The faithful do not take Jews and Christians as friends anyone who embraces them becomes one of them the Quran elucidating.

My opinion is that you, Monsieur, are subject to epileptic fits at very infrequent intervals, quite possibly complicated by the deleterious effects of absinthe .

Hit me baby one more time .

It is not you who slay them it is Allah moving through you.

The young man in the shabby suit stands before his first class of poor thirteen-year-old English boys at the small boarding school in Ramsgate, at a loss for what to say.

Before long, some of Jahjah’s gorillas started threatening him. It was more than Theo could bear.

Collars. Leashes.

Saint-Rémy: a medieval monastery made madhouse on the verge of a village hemmed by olive groves, cypress trees, and hot-breathed daymares.

On the next episode of his talk show, A Nice Chat , Theo called Jahjah the Prophet’s Pimp and told his gorillas to go fuck themselves.

The Muslim commander asking the caliph Umar after sacking Alexandria in 642 A.D. what to do with its library.

Each morning the no-longer young man waking in his cell, feeling inconsolably not bad.

What should I do now? Theo asked Ayaan.

The caliph responding of the library’s 700,000 volumes They will either contradict the Quran in which case they are heresy or they will agree with it in which case they are superfluous .

Dear Theo: Doctor Théophile Peyron, proprietor, is a naval man with no qualifications. The sum of my treatment consists of soaking in a tub of cold water for two hours twice a week. Afternoons, I pace the clotted garden. Evenings, I read

Shakespeare’s history plays. The food tastes moldy and filled with infinite sadness. —…

You’re a filmmaker, right? Ayaan answered. Go make a film.

And so they burned the books to heat bathwater for the soldiers.

Behind the faded green flowered curtains: the iron bars on his one tiny window, through which he painted the sun rising redly on the square field of wheat beyond.

A week later they met for lunch at a small Indian restaurant along Prinsengracht. Theo’s first words upon spreading his napkin over his lap: What kind of film?

Allah Akbar.

The no-longer young man never including the bars in his compositions.

Ayaan said she’d have to think about it. To make sure she did, Theo called her on her mobile several times over the next few weeks.

Blindfolds.

The white cap of a woman bending to reach for a dry branch.

Write a screenplay for me, Theo urged her. Any moron can write a screenplay. All you have to do is say stuff like Exterior, Day; Interior, Night . What’s so hard about that?

Khaled explaining how the first landing on the moon was faked by the CIA with the help of that famous Jew director Stanley Kubrick the agents involved murdered to erase the evidence.

If you could see the olive groves just now — the leaves, old silver, and silver gathering into green against the blue sky and the orange plowed earth — you would know there was no such thing as I.

A huge man with shaved head and nose ring gleaming goldly being led along the sidewalk by his black-and-white pocket dog with frantic unbendable legs.

Handcuffs.

You must get out of bed today, Monsieur, Dr. Peyron telling the no-longer young man with the scratchy blanket tugged over his head. You must learn to get a grip on yourself.

A lollipop-purple Vespa’s lawnmower engine bumble-beeing by.

Asking his congregation why four thousand Jews in New York decided to remain home on 9/11.

On whom? Monsieur Vincent querying muffledly.

Anything too stupid to be said is sung, Voltaire once quipping — and hence: the birth of opera.

Everyone knew Saddam was a Jew as well.

Dear Theo: I’m afraid I can’t sleep on this pillow. It stinks of dreams. Do you happen to have a spare you could part with? — Vincently Yours

And then: I think I may have something, Ayaan one evening calling to tell Theo.

The Americans who gave money to Saddam were also controlled by the Jews naturally.

Was I or wasn’t I that red-haired boy who every Sunday on his march to church to hear his father preach decelerated as he passed the headstone of his baby brother, Vincent, who had died one year to the day before he was born, and after whom he was named?