When he heard these words, and saw the look on the white trader’s face, Fiskadoro understood that his whole purpose in the dream was to go through the ceremony and make himself like other men.
While these people didn’t see any ghosts, Fiskadoro considered himself a ghost among them, one of the waking world, and he took to wandering the village like the other less visible ghosts — a few hundred meters from end to end, a path that took him past the dark entrances of huts, through clouds of smoke and a mist of voices speaking a language that made no sense. The children liked him and sometimes followed him around, trying to touch his crotch or give him bits of food. A lot of the time he felt heavy and lifeless, and he started worrying that this wasn’t a dream at all, but the real thing. Now in the evenings Abu-Lahab built up the fires so they leapt and flared, and the stormy light yanked at the shadows so that the branches, vines, and huts seemed to cower back and then suddenly stand up and dance. The children began staying up late, drumming with sticks on hollow logs. When one night the drumming went on for hours past dark, Fiskadoro retreated into his hut and wouldn’t come out, although he never slept inside it and hardly ever let himself be found under its roof and in its smelly darkness. The two people who lived there were nowhere around. He stayed inside, hunched in a ball on the floor of rotten grasses, and cried. A little later, Zeid appeared and called him out of the hut. Zeid was alone. His face was covered with orange clay that looked green in the odd light. Fiskadoro sat before the hut and saw Abu-Lahab moving from fire to fire, scattering handfuls of powder from a bag at his waist. Violet, red, and sky-blue smoke rushed out of the flames. Meanwhile Zeid knelt beside Fiskadoro and caked the boy’s head with mud, using tender motions and speaking soft words, and then without warning he drove something sharp into Fiskadoro’s earlobe. Shivering and crying, Fiskadoro waited while Zeid moved to his other side and drove the thorn or needle through the flesh of the other ear and then tied strings through each hole. In a way that was comforting, he took Fiskadoro’s hand and told him that Mohammed lived a long time ago. The Sovereign Lord, the Lord God, the Mighty One, the Most High, gave Mohammed half His power and said, It isn’t for you to keep. Give this power to the people, some to the men and some to the women. It will save them when Hell is brought near. Mohammed went to the people but most of them didn’t believe he had any power. Show us your power, they said. Mohammed moved a whole mountain from one place to another, but the people said, That mountain has always been where we see it now. Show us again. This isn’t a power to move, tear down, or raise up, Mohammed told them. It’s the power to go on living after Hell is brought near, the power to make babies and keep generations living on the Earth. We already have that power, the people said, and left Mohammed alone. As they were leaving he said, No! — but when the Earth is beaten into dust, and your Lord comes down with the angels all around him, on that day you’ll remember your mistakes, but what good will it do you to remember? Only one man believed Mohammed, and that man believed him only a little. When Hell was brought near, this was the only man who stayed upright. Everyone else was dead. The man stood on a mountain looking for a woman to make babies, but everyone else was dead. He called his dog, but his dog was dead. Then he heard Mohammed calling him: Are you dead? No, I’m alive, the man said. If I call you as you called your dog, Mohammed said, will you come? I’m coming, Mohammed, the man said. He crossed a valley and went halfway up a mountain to Mohammed’s cave. He went inside but it was dark, and there was nothing there but a two-headed snake who talked to him with both heads at once. I am Mohammed, the snake said. You aren’t Mohammed, the man said. No, but I’m a man, the snake said. You aren’t a man, the man said. No, but I’m a part of a man, the snake said. You aren’t a part of a man, the man said. No, but I can be part of a man if a man wants the power to make babies, the snake said. Eat me where you find me. Where I go between your legs, make yourself like me. Thus sayeth Mohammed, the snake said, and he was gone. The man looked all day for the cave’s door and almost died of thirst before he found it. When he got outside he went to a stream and drank from it for half the night, and slept beside it for half the night. When he got up in the morning he opened his pants to relieve himself, and he found the two-headed snake there.
This is the man we, the Quraysh, all came from.
Fiskadoro didn’t know what Zeid was talking about.
As the little man led Fiskadoro outside into the noisy village, boys were throwing firecrackers into the flames, howling and screaming as the explosives went off amid the sound of drums and tore apart the fires and tossed coals and brands at their feet. Older boys joined the two of them as Zeid led him wherever they all were going, the boys also driven along by painted men like Zeid. Some of the men carried a massive head, covered with sparkling beads, that wobbled above their ambling procession along the trail out of the village and looked back at the boys with jutting, outraged eyes.
For two days and nights the men fed Fiskadoro and the other boys only cookies tasting of dried mud, and made them learn speeches, longer and longer ones. They recited the speeches to the boys; and in unison, to their amazement, the boys recited the speeches back.
By the end of the first day Fiskadoro felt as if he’d run down a beach until his eyes were blind and his legs were numb and had leapt into the sea to find it full of words. The tide of them rose above his chest and throat and spilled into and out of his mouth.
Fiskadoro was the first to go. The older men hemmed him around, breathing and groaning in a way that would have scared him if he hadn’t been senseless with exhaustion and hypnotized by fire. Words were said over him, and magic gestures accompanied the lowering of the big head down over his own. Through the glassy eyes of the head the brightness of the fire was shattered and magnified painfully. They knocked on the head with sticks and half-deafened him, but he managed to hear the rhythm of drums in the village blurring into one repetitive signal and the voices of women and children singing songs that made no sense.
He couldn’t see straight, his neck was tired, his voice was loud and hollow in his ears when he spoke, and he had to breathe the same air over and over. By the time the ceremony began, although he remembered everything he was supposed to remember, he’d forgotten he was wearing another head, forgotten his voice hadn’t always been huge and dark, forgotten what it was like not to be dizzy. He believed now that his head was outside of him, all around him, and that all around his head were his dreams and thoughts. He was inside-out. The wild tempo of the village percussionists cut through the trees and found his ears. The languid song of voices fell down like rain over the clearing.
“The Sovereign Lord,” Zeid said, shiny and orange across the fire, blasted by Fiskadoro’s glass vision into a dozen of himself, “the Holy One, the Giver of Peace, the Keeper of Faith; the Guardian, the Mighty One, the All-powerful, the Most High; the Creator, the Originator, the Modeler; the Unbecome, the Unborn, the Unmade; the Dissolver of Space and of Time, the Weaver of the Web of Appearances, the Inbreather and Outbreather of Infinite Universes; the Formless, Non-existent, Imperishable, and Transcendent Fullness of the Emptiness; the Voidness; the Eternal God.
“Who has the power to mystify, how did he get it, how does he keep it?”
Fiskadoro said something but couldn’t hear his own answer.
“Does there not pass over a man a space of time when his life is a blank?”
Fiskadoro knew the answer and said it.