That’s typically American, Akhmed said offhandedly one night, as he watched Bruce ablute over the bidet. Clean at home, filthy abroad.
What’s that supposed to mean? What’s the matter with a little personal hygiene? Akhmed deigned no reply. Bruce might have suggested to Akhmed that he might himself consider periodic upgrades to his personal hygiene, but, the truth was, Bruce liked him just the way he was. Visit the planet, was Bruce’s credo, but don’t disturb the fauna.
Still, he couldn’t see what Akhmed’s problem was with cleanliness.
Forget it, Akhmed said, and he settled his black-eyed gaze upon the faux Degas screwed to the wall at the foot of the bed. I’m hungry. You ready to go?
They had fallen into a routine of a meal after the hotel room. These repasts were uncomfortable, for Akhmed didn’t want to talk and Bruce did. Bruce wanted to know where Akhmed was from, what his mother was like, how many brothers and sisters, their circumstances, how much and what kind of education, and so forth, but very little information was forthcoming. Akhmed was only there to eat, and he was there to eat only because Bruce would pick up the cheque.
Once Bruce pointed out a couscous place and suggested they eat there. Non, was all Akhmed said. Instead, they stuck strictly to French bistros and cafés more or less south of Pigalle and, Bruce presumed, resolutely out of whatever neighbourhood Akhmed called his own, which, by hints Bruce detected here and there, was within walking distance of Barbès-Rochechouart.
One night as they lay in bed entre’acte, Bruce having paid in advance for a double play, as Bruce prattled on about how most people in New York had an overdeveloped sense of style, Akhmed blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling and abruptly said. In many countries in the middle east and about a third of those in Africa, I could sell you to the Islamists and they would drill holes in your knees.
As Bruce was somewhat taken aback by this turn in the conversation, as a witty friend used to term the appropriately uneven match of social skills, he simply asked why.
Because you’re American, Akhmed said, as if staring the obvious.
No, Bruce said, why would you sell me? And, despite himself, the construction sell me sent a shiver up his spine, a shiver unexpected, licentious, and unexplored.
Akhmed, who seldom deigned to look Bruce directly in the eye, did so now, and he did so out of frank incredulity. For the money.
And now another unexpected sensation shimmied up Bruce’s spine like a fun-loving singe after a banane flambée au rhum: Sold for money. Not ideology. Money. OK. Got it. But in the here and now what it means is that all this terrific sex we’ve been having tonight, and for any number of nights over the past four months, means nothing to this guy. I’m hurt, Bruce said sarcastically, but to himself. Mordacity as a defence mechanism. The root is to bite, but the one bitten is oneself. Because, quite irrationally, be was hurt. A little bit, anyway. But beneath that he liked it. Les Délcieux d’Amour dans Les Nuits de Paris, indeed. He liked it.
And what would you do with the money, he asked.
Akhmed shrugged. Same thing I do with all my money.
Which is?
I send it home to my mother.
All of your money?
All of my money.
Admirable. A Confucian would call that filial piety.
Whatever a Confucian is, Akhmed glowered, is not me.
Mostly a lost value, in my society anyway, Bruce concluded lamely.
Akhmed’s silent expression reflected only a sour disinterest.
Bruce snuggled up and traced Akhmed’s lower rib with a forefinger. And you don’t send the least tithing cent to your local mosque? he asked playfully.
The side of Akhmed’s hand clipped Bruce above the ear, catching his head between it and Akhmed’s chest, the musculature of which Akhmed had the reflexive foresight to tense, thus inducing a temporary tinnitus in both of Bruce’s ears.
Cocksucker, Bruce said reflexively, though he said it in French. He didn’t mean it that way, in the way that Akhmed thought he meant it. Bruce meant to say mangeur de bite! merely as an exclamatory remark, an expostulation of marvel over the abrupt change in the course of events. But Akhmed thought Bruce was calling Akhmed an eater of dick which, even in ordinary circumstances, would have represented a breach of protocol – another word the French may have invented, which thought caused Bruce to giggle incontinently.
Under the circumstances, Akhmed beat the shit out of Bruce. Beat him well and thoroughly, all the while saying to himself, Akhmed, you are a fool. It’s his western way. He’s an idiot. He has no idea who you are. All you’re doing is thrashing your meal ticket. And cross-rationalising: he insulted me. I pitch but I don’t catch. I’ve had it with this suceur, all he does is insult me. When he wakes up, maybe he will have learned his lesson.
Indeed, Bruce lost consciousness long before Akhmed finished with him. So that Bruce took no pleasure when, at the end, having set aside everything of Bruce’s that could possibly have any value, including his clothes, Akhmed fucked him again. Fucked him hard. Fucked him so hard that it was all that Akhmed could do to refrain from finishing the job, i.e., killing the fuckee. For he hated himself at the last moment of pleasure, because it was pleasure, and for that pleasure, he hated himself.
Finally, pretty worn out, he rolled Bruce’s senseless and pasty white old man’s bag of bones, some of them broken, off the bed onto the floor, doubled the dive-hotel pillow between his back and the wall, and smoked himself a cigarette. His hands were trembling. Strictly adrenalin, but he saw it as a weakness for which he blamed the old man and gave him a kick.
But, after only a few drags, Akhmed became too introspective to relax. What he had done, what had happened, was complex. The rigidity of the discipline he applied to his prostitution, to his money, to the whole of his circumstances, as altogether illegal as they were altogether modest, here in this thousand-year-old city of extreme decadence, of lights everywhere and of people from all over the world, a city which allowed him to live in a way that he could never live almost anywhere else… did not apply so easily to the emotions coursing through him. He felt himself a one-man colonial uprising. He would never feel himself up to the stature of a warrior of God. Yet God must have something to do with it, else why do fools such as this Bruce cross his path? He’d never had a French client who wanted to ask him about his mother. Never had a French customer who cared what he did with his money or his time away from work. Nobody had even so much as asked him what part of Morocco he was from; to them, it seemed to him, Morocco was a sort of child’s alphabet block lost among similar blocks, indistinguishable, one from the other, in a pile called ‘Africa’.