I was thinking along these lines this morning, if you can call that thinking, as I sat at a round marble-topped table on the terrace of the Café de Paris, today about noon. It was hot and I wanted to be alone so I propped this Moroccan leather briefcase I have, full of this manuscript, on the chair beside me, reserving the seat. On the table in front of me, I had my pad of letter-paper over which my pen has been hanging fire, now, for over a month. I hate writing letters but, if I was going to go on, or so I told myself in order to whip my penhand into action: “You better write this.” This was my letter to the Foundation, from whom I had heard nothing since I sent them a copy of my desert diary; pretty heavily varnished, I have to admit. I want my follow-up letter to be more business-like, maybe. After all, I have to brazen the whole thing out; my failure to cross the Sahara in less than a lifetime; my failure to find myself in Black Africa, floating down the bosom of its broad rivers through the jungle to the sea and, then, to return to the world around its hump. I mean to say to the Foundation: Frankly, I am fresh out of bread. In your service, O mighty Foundation, I have experienced extreme experience and been taken for an Adept along the Way. Extreme experience is, naturally, extremely expensive and so it should be. I have given of my person. I intended to add, rather insolently: “Now, pay me!” I considered enclosing a street photographer’s shot of me taken in the thick of the Socco Chico crush and scrawling across it, perhaps: “Which one is me?” To a man who has little or nothing to lose, after all, everything is surely permitted when dealing with these powerful abstract entities like Fundamental, for whom, equally surely, after dealing with hordes of applicants like me, nothing is true.
My other less abstract application for re-entry into the Race would be to answer a want-ad I picked out of the Paris edition of the Herald Trib. The Independent American School in Algut needs an assistant headmaster. Do they want a Black one? The ad had been running for weeks. It looks mighty like nobody is hard-enough up to take a teaching job in Africa. Besides, nobody wants to hear about Algut, the way things are going there, now. Yet, Algut is nearer the desert than Tanja, I was beginning to tell myself. Of course, I would have to teach a whole year there to get free. “Are you out of your mind?” I heard myself asking myself: “You work? Work, you?” I talk back so much all the time to that little voice in my head that anyone overhearing me might think I smoked too much keef. Which reminds me, I must have an all-out session with myself and my UHER, one day, just to see if I can make my little voice talk for the tape. I clench my eyes tight for one picosecond, just the time for one all-knowing blink, and I open them again.
All this bit just to show you how far I could be from consciously conjuring up this outrageous cat who had apparently curled himself up at my table totally unnoticed by me and was already deep in my briefcase, clawing into it like a real cat after fish, before I could snap: Scat! I blinked and here was this white fellow, already plumped down beside me, plunging into my manuscript totally unasked.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Get the hell out of my book!”
“Is that what you think you are writing?” he drawled, bathing me at the same time in a ten thousand watt Cheshire Cat grin. I started to splutter with rage but I ended by laughing at him; I just had to laugh. He was funny, hilarious even, to look at but he looked, also, very very rich in his regulation threads of camel, cashmere, vicuña and Thai silk. Quite a few years my junior, I judged with a glance at his bald head — or was it shaved? His straggly red beard was shaped Arab-style but on him it looked like a hopeless attempt at disguise. I continued to laugh. This whitey grinned back at me like a jack-o’-lantern with sunburn. “Good! That’s better,” he said. “Laughter is refusal,” he went on airily, “but, at least, it is in Present Time — the only real time there is. Snap into Present Time, Hanson,” and he had the nerve to snap his fingers like a cheap magician, right under my nose. “Mankind sleeps in a nightmare called Life! Hassan, wake up! If what I see there on the table is your forever unfinished letter to the Foundation for Fundamental Findings, Professor Hanson, forget it; you hear me? Just throw all that letter-writing out of your mind. We are the Foundation, Professor: my wife Mya and I. The name is Thay Himmer but just call me Thay. Hakim is my Arab nickname as yours is Hassan. But let’s forget about that, shall we? Hmmm?”
All this time, he is scanning me with his incandescent American dental work; feeling up my face. Ever since I was conscious in the cradle, I have hated this; hated all the slippery eyes that ever have flitted over my face like sticky-footed flies. I know what frail, hot-eyed Franz Fanon felt when he spat on himself: “Ah, le beau nègre!” I know the spleen Mohamed Ali feels when he proclaims himself, O how rightfully: the handsomest cat of them all. I am beeeauuutiful! I look down at my body, sometimes, and I say in despair: “It’s this whole system got me into this here and now.” My current relief comes from living with Hamid, who never has looked at my looks. Monkey-faced Hamid thinks he is the beauty of the family and I like it that way. What am I going to do to counter the present blue-eyed attack?
This blue-eyes is bugging me with the offer of his freckled white hand. I find myself fumbling across my own chest, taking care not to upset my coffee with my elbow; unable to look at this character squarely, at least partly I realize, because he is so overwhelmingly white. His blue-veined, hairy fingers loaded with rings wind painfully about mine with a grip like the Old Man of the Sea. I wince because I know who he is, of course: he has been cruising me, now, for a week. Everyone in Tanja knows Himmer from a photo they ran in the local Spanish-language paper, calling him: El Unico Radja Americano. Now, even the little bootblacks call him El Unico, as he sweeps around town, trailing his vicuña burnous. One good look at Thay Himmer, VII, last White Rajah-Bishop of the Farout Islands, is enough to tell you that he is more than a little bit mythological and, of course, quite unique.
His wife, the former Mya Strangleblood, is the Richest Creature in Creation. The title was worked out for her by an agency hired by her lawyers, who were anxious to avoid litigation with any of the old title-holders in the Fortune Poll of the Rich. As Suzy Scandal said in her syndicated society column: “You can’t have two Richest Girls in the World, after all, even though some of the old title-holders have refused to turn in their crowns when their fortunes faded or were spent. Princess Mya holds her title as long as she holds the Strangle-blood oil wells, pitchblende pits, uranium outcroppings and platinum lodes found on the tribal grounds of the Barefoot Indians in Northwest Canada. PP Strangleblood, her first husband, is still missing in Tibet. Her current consort, Thay Himmer, VII, lost the family outpost in the Farouts and is not very well fixed but, as Mya’s seventh husband, he was somewhat of a catch. Thay is fey but Mya is a Canadian Red Indian with both feet on the ground; said to be equally inscrutable at poker or in business, she has used her first good fortune as a spring-board to much greater wealth. Mya is said to have gotten out from under the dollar and does all her business in Basel.”