Look Behind the Curtain.

The last time I saw heard from him he was in a mess. He had
been arrested for assaulting someone in a restaurant and threatening to cut his
fucking head off. I couldn’t believe it. First of all I thought he’d got into
the drug scene or something, but where he was living there was no drug scene.
He told me. He didn’t even drink anymore. Had gone straight. Maybe that’s what
did him in.

The straight and narrow is a thin red line slap bang in the
middle of the road. The gutter is sometimes a much safer place to be. There
tends to be a lot more slack rolling around there. A lot more room to fuck up.
Anyone who has known druggies will know this. They’re all in the same boat and
they have no expectations. They don’t care if you’re not always perfectly prim
and proper. Drug friends will stay your friends no matter what. You can try to
kill them one minute then the next day go: ‘ahhh, sorry mate, that trip was
deffing me out, it fucked my head in. One moment you were there talking to me
and we were having a right laugh, the next instant you turned into a fucking lizard.I thought it was the Reptilian invasion, so I grabbed the first thing to hand, the Bluebird toffee
hammer and tried to save Earth. Sorry 'bout that mate.’

“Man that is some FUNNY shit right there. I can’t believe
you thought I was an alien. That acid was DA BOMB! Let’s get some more.”



Well, it happened to me anyway but this is the kind of thing that happens when drug people try
to kill each other. As long as the shit was good and it wears off and no one is
actually killed, then it’s usually possible to explain it within the mitigating
circumstance of recreational drug use.

But when you’re on the straight and narrow, drug and alcohol
free, and you attack someone and threatening to chop their fucking head off,
people just don’t understand. And if you say it’s because you thought they were
an alien it just makes it worse.

This is what happened to my friend. At least it’s the bits
that made sense between the incoherent ravings that Tuesday hated him for some
reason.

This is the message he sent me, I honestly haven’t
embellished the style so it sounds like something from a Lovecraft or Poe
story, it’s just the way he was I’m afraid. I was thinking of trimming the
flourishes but then it wouldn’t be his words it would be mine and that wouldn’t
be authentic.

Here it is:

It was a Tuesday when it all started, I’ve since learned
that Tuesday’s hold special significance to me but I won’t go into it here.  Suffice it to say that 9-11 took place on a
Tuesday. That’s what Tuesday is. It’s a bastard. Ask the Spanish and Greeks,
they know what I’m talking about. But you know each day seems to have a special
feeling? You know what I’m talking about right? How a Wednesday feels? How all
the days are a bit different and how certain things only happen on certain
days?



That’s because each day of the week is still owned by the Gods. Always
has been. Wednesday is Wodin’s day. Thursday is Thor’s day. It’s interesting how in the ancient languages the
same word for Sabbath and Seven are the same or at least related, but that’s because the seventh
day was a day of rest for the lord. The lord who talks to me. But the funny
thing is whenever I was on holiday I would always forget what day it was and
sometimes would have to Google it. I think I just completely contradicted
myself. I often do that. I blame reality, it’s too fluid. One moment something
works and makes sense, the next moment the world does a 180 and spins you
around and upside down. Like the law of diminishing returns, there’s something
encoded in reality which ensures that nothing works or makes sense consistently.
Like a trick to keep us all guessing so we never really manage to figure it all out.

I walked out the office onto the balcony where the rain had
just started. The children below were having their break and they were jumping
up and down and messing about in the rain. Kids always stayed indoors when it
rained in England. Here they went nuts running outside. The rain was an answer
to prayers, it was like God was talking to you and blessing you. Like he talked
to me. Though the night before I had heard the low rumble of chemtrail planes
furiously pumping the lower atmosphere full of barium salts. It’s what they do.
No mystery to it. I read an article about it. The government here have spent millions on the weather modification program. Just like the Greek Cypriots,
they paid the Russian military for their programme and they had plenty of rain
while I was there. Until the EU decided to steal all the Russian Mafia’s dirty
money parked in the Cyprus banks. They’ve had nothing but drought since then. It’s
alright for the Turks in the north, they’ve got a water pipeline. They’re
laughing. The poor buggers in the south aren’t laughing though. Still, they
make some good wine.

I was walking downstairs with my hand in my pocket rooting
for a minty sweet and I ended up with my hand all over my cheap but decent
Lenovo smart phone.

I popped the sweet into my mouth and walked downstairs to
the bathroom. As I was sat there at my ease, enjoying a bit of peace and my minty sweet, I heard
this sound. It was a sort of squeaky sound, I dismissed it for a moment as just
some random noise coming from outside, but it was strangely insistent and
seemed to be coming at me from quite close quarters. It took me a minute to get
my head around. It was coming from my pocket. I had a sudden moment of total
fear as I realized that I has accidentally pocket dialed someone by the
perverse power of mobile accessibility which seems to make it possible for a
strong sneeze to quick dial someone completely at random. In a superlative
state of sheer panic and horror I pulled the phone from my pocket as if it was
a small jabbering beast with teeth. Something or rather more evidently
‘someone’ was speaking to me through the speakers, since people were generally
not contacted by things. It was usually people. Well it was always people.
Usually.

I held the phone in my hand while trying to maintain my
balance since I was presently engaged with an Arabic lavatory which was after
all, just a porcelain hole in the ground. I held the jabbering phone and looked
at the number, it was someone I had once phoned for an apartment in Abu Dhabi.
With a complete lack of guilt or social unease I disconnected the call with a
sudden stamp of my thumb onto the red button. It was over. The fear and terror
passed. I had been lucky. I had not inadvertently phoned someone, a woman, an
old girlfriend, whose number I had taken with no intention of ever speaking to
her again.

So I went outside to nip out and get some fuul from the
Lebanese restaurant. I checked my phone. It was now 11:18 am. I had less than
12 minutes to get to the restaurant and place my order otherwise I would miss
the breakfast window. What was worse was that after breakfast there were no
lunch time sandwiches available until 12pm. The worst thing was to get there
after 11:30 and be trapped in the food void between breakfast and lunch when
there was nothing available. I couldn’t understand why this was the case but in
order to beat the void I’d better move.

I picked up my pace, doing an Olympian walk through the
playground and to the door which led through the reception area of the school
and out into the car park. I got to the door. It was locked. Locked as an
obstacle to prevent the Emirati students from escaping. The students were
always trying to escape from the school. The doors were siege points and there
had been a double door leading from the reception into the playground but this
had proved a weak point for the senior school managers and was difficult to
defend. 

Sometimes when there were so many students shouting at the students
through the wireless microphone and lashing at them with the small canes they
had, was ineffectual. The solution had been, in the best tradition of siege
defense, to brick up this weak point and replace it with a strong wall which
now no longer showed any indication of ever having been a set of doors.

I went to the side door like a cat wanting to come in, and
pawed feebly at the locked door until I caught the eye of the security guard.
He came over and unbolted the door. It was now 11.20 am.

I smiled and said thankyou and continued the Olympic walking
event and almost bowled into Kemal’s father. I apologized and he shook my hands
and we then became trapped in an Arabic exchange of pleasantries for two
minutes. When I finally got away I was absolutely crest fallen. By the time I
got into my car it was 11.23 am.

I took out my car keys and drove out of the school hoping
not to get caught in the Lebanese restaurant’s uncanny mid-day food abyss. When
I lived in Morocco I had been with this Moroccan girl who believed most of us
went through the stations of the Kabbalah without even knowing it, on a daily
basis. I thought about this, how now I was at Yesod, hungry and aiming for the
transcendental Kether of the Lebanese’ restaurant’s delicious fuul sandwich.  

As I drove the car out of the carpark onto the road I could
hear something, it sounded like a small trapped mouse. It was my damn phone
again. I must have somehow dialed someone when I fumbled in my pocket for my
keys. In the old days of telephone technology dialing a telephone was a
comparatively strenuous business and was the kind of action you couldn’t repeat
too many times without ending up with a sore index finger. I wonder what on
Earth telephone marketers used to do in the old days of rotary dial telephones
when obliged to dial number upon number, day after day. I think they had a
special finger shield. A kind of plastic sock for the finger which would
protect their finger from the repeated contact of the resistant plastic dial.
But I might have made that up. I was pretty sure I’d seen such a thing. It was
flesh coloured and covered in small nodules and turned the finger into
something resembling an exotic looking alien marital aid. 



The little mouse was
jabbering away in my pocket but I couldn’t do anything since I was driving.

By the time I got to the roundabout two minutes later it was
somehow 11:26. I was fuming at this point. Not now time thief! Give me back my
minutes you just stole! I was always having problems with the time thief, I’d
taken my eyes off the clock for a second and let my mind drift and when I came
back to myself he’d struck, stealing the minutes from right under my nose and
thinking I wouldn’t notice. I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t care if I notice
anymore, after all if I start saying that someone is stealing minutes from me
when I’m not looking what will they think? It’s very hard to prove something
like that, but I think if I had the appropriate equipment and laboratory conditions
I could probably do it. I should have been a scientist. Curse you time thief,
now I was sure to miss the fuul breakfast window and tumble into the prenoon
Daath of no food. The abyss of hunger and pointless wasted effort.

When I got to the restaurant I didn’t even dare look at the
time and I got out and made a dash for the counter, the clock I could see had a
second hand which was now 11:29 and 30 seconds. There was someone in front of
me collecting a takeaway and I saw the seconds of hope remaining me crushed
with the mindless exchange of trifling metal pieces of small change.  I ordered the fuul with only seconds left to
spare.

“I’m sorry, the breakfast is finished.”

“I’ve got five seconds left, look,” I protested showing her
the clock.

“No, that time is wrong.”

“What do you mean it’s wrong? Why is it wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know? I repeated.” I was turning into a beast from
the sheer force of hunger and the tedium of having to beg for a mere 4 dirham
sandwich of cooked fava beans.

Then the manager came and I appealed to him for some fuul,
he said he would go and check.

While I was waiting I checked my phone to see who the little
mouse voice in my pocket had been. I had dialed my mum! My poor mum caught in
my pocket talking to a pen top, a tissue and a strong mint. It’s no way to
treat your mum. I felt very guilty.

I felt Gevurah admonishing me. My pocket dialing of my poor
mum who no doubt must have felt some pleasure seeing that I was calling her,
only to find herself speaking to a pocket full of rubbish and then hanging up
whatever the literal equivalent thing is that you do to mobile phones. But then
Chesod’s light shone upon me and the manager returned asking me how many I
wanted.

“Just two. No make it three.” Then I thought for a moment,
“Actually can I have eight.”

I decided to buy fuul sandwiches for all my colleagues and
eight ought to be enough to go around.

A few moment later someone came back with a plastic bag
containing eight delicious hot fuul sandwiches.

I’d done it. In spite of all the odds I had succeeded in
getting some breakfast. I felt the crown of Kether descend upon me in my joy
and satisfaction. I felt God had blessed me and in return I would bless the
other English teachers with a hot and tasty breakfast wrap.

Just as I sat there I made a determined effort to do
something about this tiresome business of pocket dialing. I found an app to
prevent pocket dialing, downloaded it and installed it. That should do it I
thought. I slipped my phone back into my pocket and was about to drive off when
I heard that same squeaky trapped buzzy bee voice. It was annoying because I
thought I’d solved the problem but sod it I thought and drove back while the
fuul was hot.

As I drove the voice continued, I found it odd that they
didn’t just give up and hang up. As I drove I found I could actually catch
words they were saying in my pocket. At first it was just a sort of human buzz
but then I heard words, random words coming out of my pocket. I wondered if it
was my poor mum with the pen top and strong mint again, and for a second it
sounded like her, but I heard words she wouldn’t use. Then the voice sounded
male for a moment. It was hard to tell really, since I was also driving at the
same time.

I wondered what on earth was going on and why the person on
my phone was still speaking. It figured it was some kind of sales pitch or
something, or a furious ex girlfriend delivering a lecture suddenly finding an
opportunity to release or their long festered resentments composted down to the
essential bitter nutrients. Just then I thought I recognized the sad pleading
voice of my Turkish ex girlfriend.

“Jaymie Jan. Jaymie Jan. Oof ya.” I heard her repeat. Jan is
the Turkish word life and putting ‘Jan’ after a person’s name is a term of
endearment.  But I didn’t even have her
number now so how could I have pocket dialed her? Besides our terms of
endearment had long since come to terms and the last time I spoke to her she
was still bitter and ranting about all the things she said I’d done wrong.

I tried to tune-in to the sound and just then something came
through loud and  clear.

“Look  behind the
curtain. We’re behind the curtain.”

I pulled the car over suddenly. This was too strange and
specific a phrase, I had to find out who it was. I took out my phone to see who
had called me. That phrase ‘we’re behind the curtain’ was weird. Who would say
that? except a group of children who’d had enough of playing hide and seek. I
knew plenty of children, but for the most part I tried to teach them English,
hide and seek wasn’t even on the syllabus.

I looked to see who had called. No-one. There had been no
phone call. There was no record of anything.

Obviously it was a bug with the new software. It hadn’t
worked and also had the added effect of denying all knowledge of the fact that
it  hadn’t worked by refusing to reveal
who it was the software had failed to prevent you from finger dialing. It
seemed to have software installed which covered up the fact it didn’t work.

Clearly I needed to uninstall it and try something else.
Aware that the hot fuul was cooling down, but determined to end this tedious
finger dialing charade NOW, I quickly uninstalled the software and downloaded
and installed an alternative. It seemed that this was a very common problem and
there were at least half a dozen possible software solutions to resolving it.
It just appeared the some of them didn’t actually work.

I was starving so decided to waste no more time and got stuck
into one of the fuul sandwiches which God had in his mercy, given to me and my
friends. I unwrapped the sandwich while looking out across the beautiful Bay of
the Two Jaws. Probably the most beautiful spot in the whole county and
certainly somewhere in the top ten for the whole Arabian peninsula and pondered
the beauty of this place while I ate. The fuul was delicious, perfectly
seasoned, like how good baby food used to taste. An unctuous tasty salty pate
with fresh chopped peppers and onions.



As I was eating for some reason a long
forgotten memory came to me, of a time I had been cruel to my sister with a
girl from down the road. A skinny girl with drab black hair in a tight pony
tail, with scabs on her knees and a perpetually runny nose. A nasty girl who
incited me to do mean things to my sister. The whole strange friendship lasted
from summer to deep winter, there was no sense of attraction or anything like a
‘girlfriend’ at least not for me. She brought out a strange desire to be nasty.
Some people seem to do that.



This dark period came to an end and I was returned
to my usual peaceful and cruelty free solitude when I threw a snowball at her
bay window, all in friendly jest and certainly within the spirit, I thought, of
our friendship. Her parents didn’t see it like that and I almost thought for
one childish moment that I would be hauled off to Borstall, such was the
overreaction which greeted me at school the next day at assembly with the
headmaster making an example of me to the whole school. The headmaster even got
me in his office and jabbed me with his knuckled in his special deadly Taekwondo
move which he liked to inflict on naughty boys. Well if she can’t take a joke,
I thought. And I never spoke to her again. I think that snowball was a blessing
and whatever spirit of infantile mischief impelled me to throw it was really
doing me a big favour and removing from my life, some strange unsavoury
associations. Even though they were kids. Kids are the worst, most of what
happens in the tiny world they live in escapes the notice of the adults living
in a world several orders of magnitude larger and operating on entirely
different principles, and all under the delusions that kids are cute and
harmless, never suspecting the animal hierarchical hell of cruelty they can
inflict on each other.

I thought of my poor sister, her childish face, four years
old, four years my junior. As Vicky and I amused ourselves by telling her to
eat leaves because they were ‘secret garden candy’.

At that moment with that thought I bit my finger hard. Ouch!
Another pattern. Whenever we berate ourselves with some past sin karma always
looks for an immediate way to make itself felt. Biting a finger while eating a
sandwich, stubbing a toe, burning a finger on a hot stove. There were a million
ways for the demons employed by the Karmic collection agencies to extract
instant payment. I should have been a scientist. I can spot patterns where none
thought they existed. Never mind watching molecules and looking for atoms, why
not work with the best reality raw material we could ever have? Our own
psychological interactions with reality itself.

Damn I bit my finger really hard. You have to keep your wits
about you whenever you think about something you’ve done wrong. Have no hot
implements to hand, under no circumstances find yourself in a kitchen, and never
attempt anything with fingers in the vicinity of hot, sharp, slippery burny
things. I had been caught in the Karma kitchen many times in my life and have a
collections of burn scars and small cuts to prove it. The demons of Karma could
strike any moment as you mind slips into a million avenues of guilt. At that
point you are an easy target for anything malevolent. Undefended by your own
guilty conscience.

I looked at my finger. It had two teeth marks in the skin.

I tested the new app before I set out to drive. I decided to
try to call someone, my mum, since there was no one else I would willingly speak
to. Finding myself approaching middle-age with no burdens of my own family and
long since having given up on women, I found history repeating itself and my
strongest, best and indeed, aside from my sister, my only relationship of any
kind with a woman, was with my mother. I didn’t feel inwardly embarrassed by
this in the least. I wasn’t a forty year old virgin, I was a forty year old
child. Slightly different. Everyone in the world was turning into stone,
nothing but grey faced brittle idiots locked in an eternal pose. Same job
everyday for ten years, same house, same people. You might as well be parked
outside the fountain a grinning piece of rock covered in moss and pigeon shit. 



I hadn’t changed much since my first dim memories of preserved consciousness
around the ages of two or three. I knew even then, or at least I was learning
fast, that the world was not my friend and it was filled with endless horror.
It took me forty years to understand that the world is only the friend to those
‘special people’, who have the ability to trick people, the sociopaths,
politicians, crooks and charlatans. Those people generally do very well and are
on very friendly terms with the world and its inhabitants. Open and honest
people are destroyed or driven to despair. Since I realized that the world was
managed in this way I determined that I would personally bring no more
beautiful innocent souls here just in order to see them either slowly
corrupted, or destroyed or driven to despair. This combined with my final realization
that men and women had nothing in common and would be really better off keeping
away from each other for as much of their time on Earth as they are able, set
me on this course of doing just what the hell I wanted with my life and totally
giving up on women, children and indeed, most relationships with other humans
since no one really understood my perspective. 



They were just gaudy puppets,
going through the motions. I felt I had broken free of the puppeteer, whoever
or whatever it was, biological imperative, social conditioning, sense and
sensibility.

I dialed the number and pressed the call button. To proceed
with the call it was necessary to specifically swipe my finger, the one with
the teeth marks in, across the screen to make the call. This ought to work.

I finished my wrap and reversed back onto the main road back
to the school.

Nothing more to report on that day.

Two weeks later I was trying to escape from Dubai. I’d found
it easy enough to slip quietly into the city, leaving Khor Fakkan and driving
through the gaps blasted through the mountains. The wind, funneling down tight
mountain valleys and occasionally jumping out into the road and howling at my
car with such sudden terrifying force that my car was buffeted sideways. I
gripped the wheel tighter, shocked and alarmed at the violence of this angry
dry wind which jumped out at people. Perhaps it was a collection of djin who
had lived quietly and undisturbed in these dry dead mountains for centuries,
playing and shrieking unheard and unsuspected. Now their homes had been blasted
open now the humans in their cars teemed all over their formerly pristine
desolation. Every day, endless, all day and all night. There was no respite.
Even in the heart of their desolation the drumming hum of aircraft or the
buzzing splutter of the near infinite army of internal combustion engine
machines, carefully detonating high octane hydrocarbons in order to visit their
grandmother.

I knew that the wind was alive. There wasn’t any doubt about
this. I had discovered this fact in Casablanca. It had quite startled me at the
time, and for a moment there was a sight risk of a loss of sanity. I had felt
it slipping. The onset of terror. The realization that all around you are the
countless billions of dead souls of humans, animals and everything that ever
lived on the planet, was still alive and angrily swirling and chasing around
the whole Earth in a constant tempest, looking to cause mischief at any
opportunity. Knocking things over, scattering rubbish, escalating to tempests
hurricanes and tornadoes. Concentrated demonic fury. I thought to myself, how
can one be safe? Also while I was thinking this I heard them howl all the
louder, I heard disemobied hands, pushing at the side of my apartment with all
the rage of the djin of the Atlantic ocean weather system.

My apartment was a penthouse, well it would have been, were
it not for the fact that a landlord had built a rather shabby and barely
habitable shed on top of it, in which two strangely demon possessed people
seemed to occasionally visit. I was sure they were demon possessed because they
could read my mind and also, during Ramadan, I would hear them in their barely
habitable shed committing all sorts of noisy abominations. Ramadan was supposed
to be a time when one didn’t cede to temptation and avoided anything haram, but
these two instead doubled down, and were riotously drunk most evenings during the whole month of Ramadan, and these excesses would be punctuated by an alternating pattern of noisy
sex and violent arguments.

My apartment stood high in the air, opposite the sea lashed
Hassan II mosque, and directly opposite the surging fury of the ocean. In
summer it was ideal because the sea air kept the excessive heat of Morocco at
bay but in the winter it was a box to be rattled and wracked by the wind while
the sea tried to endlessly reclaim the land, knowing that one day it would win
its battle.

The wind that had assaulted me in the mountains on the way
to Dubai was of a different character, dry and hot, like a fossil wind which
had been roving lost in the same desert for tens of thousands of years. But the
wind was like an egregor or group consciousness, except it displayed different
abilities and strengths in different places. The desert wind was harmless except
in as much as it could whip up a sand storm. The wind in Morocco no doubt
reported on me to the wind here and this is why I was being victimized in this
way, because I knew its secret.

Once I had slid out from the mountains and hit the orange
sands of the Arabian desert the situation was greatly improved. The desert was
just too open for any fury to really accumulate, so the mountain tempest became
a dissipated desert breeze. However once I noticed a solitary desert djinn,
spinning the desert sands into a maelstrom. I stopped the car and walked behind
him as he made his scurrying spinning way. He behaved very much like a nervous
cat which didn’t want to be stroked. I followed him and he kept moving away
from me, until once I jumped right into him and felt his spinning confusion
rush all around me.  Then he dashed off
at an acute angle and since I can’t run diagonally through desert sand I
abandoned the chase, got back into my car and continued to Dubai.

As I said, slipping into Dubai was easy. I parked at Rashida
station and slipped into the city’s elegant steel and glass metro system, but
getting out was a nightmare. Always the same story with cities. They suck you
in and all roads lead to them. They breathe you into their circulatory systems
through a thousand different routes and inviting motorway exits. But to escape
requires a lesson in patience and good driving skills. Several times while
trapped on the exit of the D89 and entry to the E311, a sort of motorway limbo
between worlds, where civilisations could rise and fall on distant planets and
you’d have moved less than four Earth feet. The particular difficulty of a
traffic jam here is that there was no sense of order. Cars would continue to
fly into the stationary line of idling cars, crow-baring themselves into the
exit lane at the last possible moment. Big white dusty buses full of dusty
Pakistanis and bus drivers brazenly forcing their wheezy battered buses between
a three inch gap.

As I was stuck there, in a rising terror of urban
claustrophobia, trying to resist the compulsion to get out of my rental car and
just leave it and all the chaos behind while I ran into the peace and
protection of the desert, I heard a sound. It sounded like a kind of
high pitched whine, like a particularly loud mosquito. As I listened the sound
seemed to take form and became a woman’s voice.

“Are you there? Are you there?”

I heard it say. Not my damn phone again. I hadn’t even
touched it this time and it still rang.

Then the voice changed to a man’s voice and it said:

“Hold your breath, make a wish, count to three.” I did just
as it suggested, I wished that the traffic would start to move and I would be
able to get home. Then I heard some music come from somewhere….and then Gene
Wilder’s voice singing the Willy Wonka song Pure Imagination. Then I heard the
sound of a dozen cacophonous car horns behind me which told me that seemingly a
line had opened in the traffic.

To be continued....