The man grinned at me. “Let me give you a lesson in shrewd business. The esteemed gentleman offered me a thousand dinars for a four-thousand-dinar stone. Should I take the reward, or sell the stone for its full value?”
“Selling the stone will bring trouble,” I said.
“Let me worry about that. Now you go to hell. I don’t ever want to see you around here again.”
He needn’t worry about that. As I left the decrepit coffeehouse, I popped out the moddy I was wearing. I don’t know where the Half-Hajj had gotten it; it had a Malaccan label on it, but I didn’t think it was an over-the- counter piece of hardware. It was a dumbing-down moddy; when I chipped it in, it ate about half of my intellect and left me shambling, stupid, and just barely able to carry out my half of the plan. With it out, the world suddenly poured back into my consciousness, and it was like waking from a bleary, drugged sleep. I was always angry for half an hour after I popped that moddy. I hated myself for agreeing to wear it, I hated Saied for conning me into doing it.
On the bus, I sat next to him, but I didn’t want to talk to him or listen to him gloat.
“What’d we get for that chunk of glass?” he wanted to know. He’d already replaced the real diamond in his ring.
I just handed the money to him. It was his game, it was his score. I couldn’t have cared less. I don’t even know why I went along with him, except that he’d said he wouldn’t come to Algeria with me unless I did.
He counted the bills. “Two hundred? That’s all? We got more the last two times. Oh, well, what the hell — that’s two hundred dinars more we can blow in Algiers. ‘Come with me to the Kasbah.’ Little do those gazelle-eyed boys know what’s stealing toward them even now, through the lemon-scented night.”
“This stinking bus, that’s what, Saied.”
He looked at me with wide eyes, then laughed. “You got no romance in you, Marid. Ever since you had your brain wired, you been no fun at all.”
“How about that.” I didn’t want to talk anymore. I pretended that I was going to sleep. I just closed my eyes and listened to the bus thumping and thudding over the broken pavement, with the unending arguments and laughter of the other passengers all around me. It was crowded and hot on that reeking bus, but it was carrying me hour by hour nearer to the solution of my own mystery. I had come to a point in my life where I needed to find out who I really was.
The bus stopped in the Barbary town of Annaba, and an old man with a grizzled gray beard came aboard selling apricot nectar. I got some for myself and some for the Half-Hajj. Apricots are the pride of Mauretania, and the juice was the first real sign that 1 was getting close to home. I closed my eyes and inhaled that delicate apricot aroma, then swallowed a mouthful of juice and savored the thick sweetness. Saied just gulped his down with a grunt and gave me a blunt “Thanks.” The guy’s got all the refinement of a dead bat.
The road angled south, away from the dark, invisible coast toward the city of Constantine. Although it was getting late, almost midnight, I told Saied that I wanted to get off the bus and grab some supper. I hadn’t eaten anything since noon. Constantine is built on a high limestone bluff, the only ancient town in eastern Algeria to survive through centuries of foreign invasions. The only thing I cared about, though, was food. There is a local dish in Constantine called
I had my soup, and it was wonderful. Saied just watched me wordlessly and sipped a glass of tea. We got back on the bus in time. I felt good now, comfortably full, and warmed by a nostalgic glow. I took the window seat, hoping that I’d be able to see some familiar landscape as we passed through Jijel and Mansouria. Of course, it was as black as the inside of my pocket beyond the glass, and I saw nothing but the moon and the fiercely twinkling stars. Still, I pretended to myself that I could make out landmarks that meant I was drawing closer to Algiers, the city where I had spent a lot of my childhood.
When at last we pulled into Algiers sometime after sunrise, the Half-Hajj shook me awake. I didn’t remember falling asleep. I felt terrible. My head felt like it had been crammed full of sharp-edged broken glass, and I had a pinched nerve in my neck, too. I took out my pill case and stared into it for a while. Did I prefer to make my entrance into Algiers hallucinating, narcotized, or somnambulant? It was a difficult decision. I went for pain-free but conscious, so I fished out eight tabs of Sonneine. The sunnies obliterated my headache — and every other mildly unpleasant sensation — and I more or less floated from the bus station in Mustapha to a cab.
“You’re stoned,” said Saied when we got in the back of the taxi. I told the driver to take us to a public data library.
“Me? Stoned? When have you ever known me to be stoned so early in the morning?”
“Yesterday. The day before yesterday. The day before that.”
“I mean except for then. I function better with a ton of opiates in me than most people do straight.”
“Sure you do.”
I stared out the taxi’s window. “Anyway,” I said, “I’ve got a rack of daddies that can compensate.”
“Marid Audran, Silicon Superman.”
“Look,” I said, annoyed by Saied’s attitude, “for a long time I was terrified of getting wired, but now I don’t know how I ever got along without it.”
“Then why the hell are you still decimating your brain cells with drugs?” asked the Half-Hajj.
“Call me old-fashioned. Besides, when I pop the daddies out, I feel terrible. All that suppressed fatigue and pain hits me at once.”
“And you don’t get paybacks with your sunnies and beauties, right? That what you’re saying?”
“Shut up, Saied. Why the hell are you so concerned all of a sudden?”
He looked at me sideways and smiled. “The religion has this ban on liquor and hard drugs, you know.” And this coming from the Half-Hajj who, if he’d ever been inside a mosque in his life, was there only to check out the boys’ school.
So in ten or fifteen minutes the cab driver let us out at the library. I felt a peculiar nervous excitement, although I didn’t understand why. All I was doing was climbing the granite steps of a public building; why should I be so wound up? I tried to occupy my mind with more pleasant thoughts.
Inside, there were a number of terminals vacant. I sat down at the gray screen of a battered Bab el-Marifi. It asked me what sort of search I wanted to conduct. The machine’s voice synthesizer had been designed in one of the North American republics, and it was having a lot of trouble pronouncing Arabic. I said, “Name,” then “Enter.” When the cursor appeared again, I said, “Monroe comma Angel.” The data deck thought about that for a while, then white letters began flicking across its bright face:
I had the machine print out the address. The Half-Hajj raised his eyebrows at me and I nodded. “Looks like I’m gonna get some answers.”
“Inshallah,” murmured Saied. If God wills.
We went back out into the hot, steamy morning to find another taxi. It didn’t take long to get from the library to the Kasbah. There wasn’t as much traffic as I remembered from my childhood — not vehicular traffic, anyway; but there were still the slow, unavoidable battalions of heavily laden donkeys being cajoled through the narrow streets.
Number 16 was an exhausted, crumbling brick pile with two bulging upper stories that hung out over the
