Lance Olsen: Head in Flames

It was the last statistic Theo encountered which tickled him most: that one in five of those identifying themselves as atheists also believed in God.

Eat halal food pray travel to Mecca embrace jihad but if you feel no hatred for the enemies of Islam you will always remain a heathen .

Biding his time for an augury, then biding his time some more.

Nature abhors a fact.

One afternoon the rumble in your staircase the rapping at your door the police raiding your flats arresting the Sheik four of your friends throwing them in jail but praise be to Allah they somehow overlooked you.

Yet the auguries remaining voiceless.

Theo laughing aloud on his bike at the very idea and wondering: the cute coed with the heart-shaped ass— where did she go?

The filthy bastards convinced you were nothing to them even though you tried to tell them differently I am Allah’s fiery sword you said That’s nice they said Now get the hell out of here .

Voiceless and invisible.

Theo casts a quick glance over his shoulder. She must have already been swallowed up by this morning’s commotion.

You delivered pizzas to your friends in their cells cursed the guards as you passed but they pretended you weren’t there the shits.

Sleeping on the floor of a cold shed behind his family’s house without a blanket — except that the young old man couldn’t sleep.

The shape, it occurs to him, of his ex-wife’s derrière.

No actual crime having been committed no laws broken they explained after a few days and so they let everyone go easy as that.

His sensorium finching in agitation against the night’s window.

Christianity: a tragedy with a happy ending, someone once called it.

Prowling your neighborhood like a cat caught in sleet.

Every day his head hungover with the effort.

One nearly gives up on music, thinks Theo, and then—

For us the closed travel agencies offering cheap flights to Morocco and Turkey.

Looking is not as simple as it looks, Pissarro once remarking beside me on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, his eyes locked against the whirligigging height.

— and then you stumble across a group like Arcade Fire and you relocate a reason to listen again.

For us my father’s unbearable servility.

A sip of flaming licorice: to help extinguish the waking blaze in the mind’s engine.

My son. Ours. A sign that we have shared the same space.

The dreary row houses with graffiti on their walls satellite dishes blooming like Teflon-gray mushrooms among clotheslines fluttering with sheets shirts djellabas.

It is April. It is 1879. The less-than-young man is in a metal basket hurtling down the gullet of the Marcasse coal mine in the Borinage district to see for himself the daily lives of the wretches and wrecks to whom he will preach.

Theo understanding he doesn’t miss her so much as he misses the person he used to be when he was with her.

Grim women in dark headscarves leaking from the supermarket bulky plastic grocery bags hanging from each arm.

Five hundred meters above, daylight shying to a star in an otherwise joltingly black sky.

The thought of Theo having just finished a thirteen-part series for Dutch TV called Najib and Julia: his retelling of Romeo and Juliet .

Five or six men your age hanging around the scruffy kebab joint in thigh-length T-shirts baggy pants baseball caps waiting for something they couldn’t name even if you asked them.

Sour air. Water seepage.

This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it , John Adams once commenting.

Is that—

The miners’ lamps glistening off wet stone walls.

Najib: the clever young man of Moroccan descent living in one of Amsterdam’s dish cities, delivering pizzas to save enough money to attend university. His father’s health botched from his years at the factory.

No.

The unyoung man nonlived, like the miners, in one of the ramshackle huts scattered through the woods and along the muddy dirt roads.

Najib’s mother bewailing her fate of being forced to live in this infected land. His sister, in jeans and headscarf, lounging on the couch, watching Lebanese pop groups on MTV.

It’s my house I paid for it I own it it’s mine now get—

In any case, it was lovely to have known him.

Julia: the cute young Dutch woman from a wealthy family living in an expensive part of The Hague, hoping to be chosen for the national field hockey team. Her father a policeman who married above his station. Her mother strung out on a series of New Age fads and the prim rose garden she keeps out back.

You don’t need me your father saying I don’t need you .

He handseled his warm clothes to them, dressed in a tatty army jacket and crumpled hat, ceased washing the coal dust from his face.

Floris, Julia’s lanky blond trainer, is in love with her. She doesn’t happen to share his sentiments.

You standing there in the kitchen feeling your father’s eyes hating you.

Such unorthodox behavior putting off his mission sponsors who refused to renew his appointment, explaining in a letter to him he quote lacked God’s oratory gift unquote.

One afternoon Julia enters a clothing store.

The devil be with you for this uselessness you’ve become your father saying.

Don’t worry yourself, Pissarro confiding as we rambled along the duckshit green Oise one spongy May afternoon, hands knotted behind our backs like a pair of ancient philosophers. God takes care of imbeciles, children, and artists.

A shop girl is busy harassing Najib, accusing him of stealing, saying: All fucking Moroccans are fucking thieves . Julia admires how calm Najib remains, how he refuses to allow his dignity to falter before the shop girl’s loathing.

You have been the greatest disappointment in my life if only I had never been burdened with this woman of a son what evil did I commit to bring on such a punishment?

I sold a painting once.

When the shop girl finally huffs and wanders off, Julia approaches Najib with a compliment.

Feeling your stereotypical father turning you into another stereotype.

Once.

They exchange phone numbers. They arrange a date.

And then—

Once.

Enraged by Julia and Najib’s augmenting relationship, Floris attacks his rival in the street, knocks him from his scooter, kicks him as he tries to regain his footing. Theo loves this scene. The way the music works. The way the light tinks off chrome.

And then it is the last night and it is Ramadan and you are sitting cross-legged with your friends in your flat.

To Anne Boch, the Belgian painter’s sister, for four hundred francs.

Do well, and —how does that line go?

A time for fasting prayer good deeds.

Dear Theo: I would like to write you about many things, yet I feel in the end such an endeavor is useless, yet I keep writing. Why? —V.

Do well, and you will have no need of ancestors , Voltaire observing.

Is it—

It is February. It is 1890. No, that’s—

Julia’s father and Floris’s insisting the couple stop seeing each other.

Talking about the old days over lentil soup garbanzo beans diced tomatoes chopped celery cinnamon cumin turmeric cilantro leaves.