Khuftullah flies to Timbuktu, Mali, then he will take a ride to the Ribāt Al-Tanzīh camp. The Jeep smells of pistachio farts. There’s the driver, and two other passengers, and Khuftullah. Khuftullah recognizes none of them. They pass around bottles of Nestle water. It’s afternoon and the sun is murderous in Mali. They pass goatherders on foot, the men and goats are made of dust.
He wonders if they can see right through him, to the inversion within him, the LaFleur thing. Is it written on his face?
It’s about thirty minutes into the ride when the guy in the passenger seat says to Khuftullah, in English, “We were told to blindfold you.”
“I’ve been to the camp before, I’ve seen everything.”
“We were still told. By the Emir.”
“Do you know who I am? You must be new.”
“I know who you are,” the front passenger says, looking back into the Jeep. “Your name is Maz Khan. We know this. But what’s your war name?”
“Khuftullah.”
Laughter breaks out in the stinky Jeep, among the two brothers, driver and passenger.
“We heard about you,” the passenger up front says. “‘You feared God.’ Why did you stop? What happened?”
“It’s past tense. You need to work on your tongue,” says the driver.
“You don’t still fear God. Why don’t you still fear God?”
“You should still fear God. It’s an ongoing thing, so an ongoing verb.” The driver is a tall dark guy with an Adam’s apple like a lump of coal under his scraggly beard.
“I read your pamphlet you wrote about the movies,” the man sitting next to Khuftullah says. He hasn’t spoken up yet. He has gold eyes. He didn’t laugh at Khuftullah’s clumsy name, this makes him more menacing somehow. “Stifin Sbilburgh. The Third Vision of Islam, with the Jewish astronaut avoiding the Crusader government’s military, he penetrates their secret camp, and is carried off to Paradise by the angels. Then Indiana Jones.” He’s smiling. “I disapprove of Dr. Jones for he is an idolater. Islamic treasures have no worth to him. He rescues the magic coffin of the Jews, a Hindu pebble, and the goblet of Jesus. Where are the treasures of Islam? The only value a Muslim has is as slave labor for excavating or for him to shoot in the souk.”
“There’s Sallah,” the front passenger says.
“I spit on Sallah. He’s a collaborationist pig,” the golden eyed man says, eyeing Khuftullah for a reaction. “Islam has no idols for America to plunder. Bin Laden will behead Dr. Jones if he tries to steal the Ka’aba.”
The front passenger is excited. “I heard Indiana Jones 4 is about Indy finding a book which undermines all Islamic belief, specifically a book saying all our Hadith are forgeries.”
“Where did you read that?” The golden eye man’s voice is full of contempt.
“I read it on a website. They said Sbilburgh will do it.”
Khuftullah speaks up. “Do you believe everything you read on those websites?” It’s a risk to join the flow of the debate, but it pays off. The golden eyed man laughs.
“My name is Razi,” the front passenger says. “This is Dawood.” Indicating the driver. Then he points to the golden eyed man, saying “This is Dr. Faraj Al-Misri.”
“No relation to the Faraj who offed Sadat,” Faraj says. “These aren’t our real names, actually, but you knew that.”
Razi says, “You like movies. You want to see a movie? Better than Stifin Sbilburgh?” Razi leans back into the Jeep holding a new RIM BlackBerry Pearl and on the phone’s small screen shows Khuftullah a video of a large truck driving into a distant marketplace in what must be a city in Iraq. The marketplace is busy. The video is short, the driver detonates a bomb which rocks the camera recording it. The camera operator yells “God is great” in Arabic and Razi repeats it. “Basra. Scores of Shi’ite devils sent to Hell.” Razi is grinning. The screen of the phone is tiny but to Khuftullah it’s like panoramic vision.
Razi notices Khuftullah admiring the technology. “TFT LCD. Thin-film-transistor liquid-crystal-display.” It’s like a magic spell coming off of Razi’s tongue. “That’s 240 by 260 pixels. We in the tanzim are what they call on tech websites ‘Lighthouse customers.’”
“What’s a pixel?” Khuftullah asks.
“Pixels are what you have none of. Let’s see your phone,” Razi says, gesturing to Khuftullah, who hands over his miserable Nokia.
Razi holds it up like a piece of shit, saying, “My grandmother has a better phone.”
They laugh. Khuftullah is an engineer and he knows what a pixel is, he’s just playing up to them.
“Fail. Epic fail,” Dawood says.
Razi hands back the Nokia. “We’re giving you a better phone. New orders from on high.”
Dawood says, with reverence and awe, “The Emir has an LG Prada. It has a touchscreen. 8 megabytes.”
“What’s a touchscreen?” Khuftullah asks. He really hasn’t heard of this.
“Ask Steve Jubz a year from now,” Faraj Al-Misri says.
Razi digs through a bag by his feet, comes up with a red RIM BlackBerry Pearl like his own. “Your new phone. Latest model.” Razi and Khuftullah and al-Misri have a conversation comparing mobiles vs smartphones like that scene in The American Psycho (Khuftullah secretly saw it in Paris in 2002) where Christian Bayl “Batman” and the guys compare business cards.
“2006 will be the year of the QWERTY keyboard,” Razi says, no doubt quoting a tech website, adding “BlackBerry has encrypted email capabilities, that’s why we bought a shitload of them in Pakistan.”
Khuftullah looks over his gleaming BlackBerry Pearl 8100 with awe. Like being given a new sword by the Emir. He runs his thumbs over the keyboard, the stout keys like the studs on a piece of armor.
“QWERTY keyboard,” Faraj Al-Misri says, as if showing off a Lamborghini Countache in a Dubai auto dealer’s yard. “Can you read English better than you know Arabic?”
Razi settles back in his seat and says, “RIM BlackBerry is nicknamed ‘CrackBerry,’ do you get that? Do you understand?”
“CrackBerry,” Dawood says. “Epic fail.”
Now this is burned into my brain. Very good and irreverent, which I like. You may lose folks with extreme nerdiness towards the middle, and this is from someone who has studied ABRAHAMIC theology a bit, but not Islam. Does it come with a glossary? It picks up (ha) again at the end and left me wanting more.