Pixi and The Boy That Never Was

In Which Pixi and 夢幻 Save Star Fish and We are Such Things as are Made to Be Broken

2012-01-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

夢幻 says, “Aishitoude.” And then they watch the giant seagulls pick about Brighton beach, with feathers meticulous like they'd been moulded out of rubber. As big as Sufi-cat, possibly taller and twice as angry looking, they squawk about like they’re looking to pick a fight or bully someone. They squabble with each other over the deposits of last night's high-tide.

"What are they eating?" Pixi asks after having watched them for long enough. 夢幻 stops chucking the random stone at nothing in particular after having near buried his last target; a sprite can. He lends his attention to the seagulls.

"Star fish?" he wonders aloud and with a little disbelief. "No, can't be. They wouldn’t come so far in." he stands up and dashes to the nearest flock. The gulls scatter angrily. Pixi gets to her feet and follows him only to dash back for her camera and then dash to his side again, a little out of breath. Sure enough, at their feet is a half masticated starfish, as large as Pixi's hand.

"Oh my God," Pixi is a bit shaken. She's never seen one alive before, and never imagined they'd be kind of grotesque.

"Yuck," 夢幻 makes like he's gonna kick it but she grabs his arm.

"Please don't. Poor thing." Halting in mid-kick, 夢幻 catches sight of that look in her eyes which he always feels powerless against. Like the gaze of a buddah: sensuous, sad and sacred all at once. "Can we save it?"

"Haaaiiiii," he bends down, grabs one of the creature’s arms without hesitation, and then chucks it like he would a Frisbee, back into the sea. Watching it airborne for a few seconds, Pixi is filled with a stillness that completes her. She dashes across the beach with 夢幻 following behind. The two racing to find more starfish and rescue them from the Seaguls and certain death on dry land.

‘Aishitoude,’ he’d said like it was an indisputable fact of life. Fire burns. Gravity pulls. And I too will break your heart one day. But right now, I mean it with every fiber every fragment of my being. Aishitoude. And when he said it, the world, for all its inescapable realities which deem us so regrettably fragile, was beautiful. And so was our fragility. And so were we.

“Aishitouyo”, Pixi responds eventually, yelling to have her voice heard above the roar of the surf and the wind and the crying guls. 夢幻 smiles a chuffed smile and shakes his head because she never fails to surprise him.

“You’re eyes are broken,” he teases to imply she’s made the worst choice in the world in choosing him, but it’s too late now. He tells her this often as well, ‘It’s too late! Haha!’

“You’re broken!” she sticks out her tongue.

“You’re broken!” he says back childishly, and then wrapping his arm around her, nuzzles his nose against her ear as he adds, “Perfectly broken.” Pixi gets shy and pushes him away, and夢幻 sprints across the beach again at another gathering flock which disperses immediately.

‘Perfectly broken’ Pixi thinks, as she watches him pick up the beached starfish and hurl it flying through the air and back into the sea.

***

On the other side of the line they cross in Pixi’s dingy hotel room, the sky is so full with stars. Overwhelmed by the sight, Pixi feels frightened. It is as though tiny-she were exposed futilely in the centre of outer-space where the universe transpires upon some rythmic and ancient course to emulate eternity. Some stars appear so close that one can almost pluck them from mid-air. Pixi attempts this, and to her surprise the spark before her darts away from her reach, betraying its nature.

"A fire-fly!" Pixi exclaims. "there was one right in front of my nose!" she pauses in her tracks when she notices more and more if them floating past her. "oh my God, they're everywhere!"

"Of course they are, we're following them," the Boy chuckles, leading the way. "and there's more where we're going."

Pixi breaks out into an abrupt skip to catch back up with him. When she does she resumes her old pace to match his, and takes in her surroundings as they walk. Sure enough, the fire-flies increase, and when the Boy and Pixi's path leads them through a thicket of trees that roof over to block out the night-sky, their glow is the only light. It leads them through the pitch darkness in which Pixi cannot make out a tree-trunk nor a low hanging branch from the dense, forest shadow.

Eventually, a clearing appears, and in it is a spring that catches the heavens on its surface. In fact the first thing which greets them is the reflection of moonlight on the waters. As beautiful an attempt as it is, it merely compliments the light that stains the Easter horizon. The moon itself is nowhere in sight, but the clouds which hide her, glow as though a White fire burned in their breast. Pixi pauses again and gapes about at the dance of the fireflies which hover around the spring like pilgrims that have reached their destination. She closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath. When she opens them again it is because the Boy's hand has slipped into hers.

"We don't stop yet," he says and guides her until they reach some mossy crags. Here he let's her hand go and leads the way upwards. It's an easy and quick climb. But they don't stop at the top. They go right over and climb halfway down the other side until they reach a very specific bolder. the two sit on this, facing the moonlight and the surrounding hills yonder.

"Now what?" Pixi asks, because she'd rather go back to the clearing with it's spring and fireflies.

"Now we wait and watch," the Boy pulls one leg up and dangles the other off the bolder. "You wanted to see the wolves, no?"

"Eh?!" Pixi 'eh's excitedly.

"They're mostly unreliable, and it’s tough to trace their haunts. But ever since I was little I'd steak out the trails they followed to patrol their terrain. Eventually a pattern emerged: on the 14th of every Lunar month they'll make a passage here."

"Why?"

"Beats me," the Boy shrugs and turns his gaze to the stars. Pixi watches him for a moment before reaching out to hold his hand. This distracts him, "you ok?" he asks. Pixi nods but then pauses in mid-nod to shake her head instead. "What's wrong?"

"This really is a dream right?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

"It was... The only way I knew how-"

"Don't." Pixi squeezes his hand to make him stop and then pulls hers away. She holds herself sadly. "This isn’t it. Don’t say anything at all if that’s what you’re going to say. "

"Pixi there's...ok. I won't." he smiles a bit bitterly.

“Say something else,” she elbows him teasingly, to lighten the mood. When he turns to look at her though, there is nothing light about the way he does it.

“I made a deal, Pixi. And I made a promise.” Pixi understands his meaning without need for further explanation. Not again, she’s thinking all the while. Not you. Not this time. Not again.

“Promise me you will go back and get the hell on with it,” his eyes are piercing and demanding, and every time his face is cast in shadow, they glow in that distracting way.

“You’re so damn sensitive,” Pixi quips sarcastically.

“Well I don’t want to make a huge boohoo out of it, that’s all.”

“Eh?” she looks hurt. “Why bloody not?!”

“Coz it’s easier this way. That’s why bloody not.”

“Denial is a dangerous thing,” she mutters half under her breath, and refuses to look at him.

She doesn’t see what his face is like when he says what he says next. She doesn’t know that he’s not only giving her up but trying to save the rest of her life.

“When heartbreak comes, bow your head to it,” he whispers. “Then Harden to stave off madness. But when hardness is home, run away.” Home and run away. The combination brings to her mind Stand by Me, and Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, and everything else about coming of age nostalgia. It also reminds her of him. A lean boy with an angry scowl and golden tan and brilliant teeth and...probably nothing that remarkable about him at all. Except that he took Pixi’s first love to the grave, and somewhere of little interest to anyone, that made all the difference in the world.

Correction: An earthquake took it. Why the hell did everything about her have to be so damn dramatic?

“Pixi,” the Boy distracts her from her thoughts. She looks at him and realises for the first time that it is all ok now. It doesn’t matter. “Now is the time to bear your wounded breast again,” he says. “We are such things as are made to be broken.”

“Pish,” she feigns irreverence to hide the effect his words have had on her. “What is that, the inspired insights of a comatose?”

“Something like it,” he grins. Pixi becomes serious again.

"Are you going to be alright?" she asks.

"I'm always alright."

"I mean will you be better? Will you wake...from this?"

"I deserve never to wake, if I'm not man enough to ask if I can kiss you tonight," the Boy smiles half-shy half daring the way a boy is when he's banking his man-card on an act which can break or make him.

"Only if you tell me your name," is Pixi's response.

His smile broadens into something heartbreakingly beautiful, "which do you want? The one they all know me by, or the one even I don't know."

"Surprise me," Pixi teases, and just then they both catch sight of some movement from the corner of their eyes.

"They're here," the Boy stands up and lends Pixi a hand to steady herself as she does too. There is a single one at first, and then the whole pack emerges. They're giants. Nearly 8 feet in height. And they move with a grace, with a sublime humanity, that a noble man could not emulate on two legs. Their movement is slow, purposeful. Their eyes and ears keen, as they take in their surroundings. Life slows in their presence. Time stops. And in that timelessness, one giant wolf turns its gaze in Pixi's direction and pierces right through her.

A breath catches in her throat, but the breath has a mind of its own and the throat feels like it belongs to another. The wolf sniffs the air, trying to read her from her smell which must be carried on the wind to him. And then as if with some obscure recognition, it squints and makes a low, howling-yelping kind of sound. Pixi's eyes are rimmed by tears when the wolf turns its attention back to its pack and then skips on gracefully to catch up with them.

This world is full of wonder, Pixi thinks. Every moment, every instant is holding its breath in anticipation of something, some great end. How meaningless and inappropriate we are in comparison.

The blurry vision in Pixi's right eye clears as a micro-ocean swells over its rim and makes a deliberate descent down her cheek. The Boy leans in close, and in her ear, whispers his name.

In Which the Boy Draws a line on the Carpet and the Year of the ShiKt is Sorry

2012-01-13T02:08:00.001-08:00

After an hour of sleep that seemed like an eternity in Sleeping Beauty’s tower, Pixi’s eyes open with a deliberation, as if of their own will. In the musty darkens of the dingy, Bahrain hotel-room, a shadow leans over her and Pixi knows instantly who it is.

“Don’t even think about it,” is her greeting.

“About what exactly?” The shadow pulls back to become upright.

“You know what.”

“How do you know I haven’t already?”

Pixi is confused then. She’s not sure if he means he’s already thought about it, or he’s already done what she warned him not to think about doing. It makes her shy and being shy makes her sit up in bed abruptly.

“I can’t see you,” she reaches out her hand and her fingers come into contact with his face. He takes it in his own and pulls it down to the mattress but doesn’t let it go.

“Better?” he asks. But before she can ask what he means, the curtain on the window across the room pull open of their own accord, and the outside street lights penetrate the darkness a tad. She can make out his face now, and her chest tightens for having missed him so much. Then she remembers she went to sleep in her underwear for lack of access to her suitcase, which by now is God knows where.

“You need to quit doing this,” she says, pulling the sheet up to her shoulders.

“Doing what?”

“Showing up or walking in on me when I’m less than decent.”

“It’s ok man,” the Boy smiles as he gets up and walks over to the chair on which she’s draped her clothes. In the darkness she can appreciate more clearly the sudden growth-spurt which has given him new height and defined his lean build. “This is a dream.” He throws Pixi her top.

“Eh?” Pixi’s hair becomes static when she pulls it on. She reaches for her hair-band, and combing threw her tresses with her fingers, ties them back.

“It’s a dream. Anything goes.”

“What like it doesn’t matter what happens?”

“Well...”

“Coz it’s not really happening. That kinda thing?”

“I didn’t mean-“

“I’m going back to sleep then, go away.” Pixi lies back down and curling up, turns her back to him feeling slighted.

“No don’t. It is happening!” the Boy comes to her side and shakes her shoulder. “Pixi don’t go.” Pixi looks up at him impatiently. She’s sore that after all this time of thinking she’d never see him again, he shows up telling her he’s not actually there.

“Are you or are you not really here?”

“I am. And so are you. This is happening. It’s just happening outside of our reality...mine and yours. It’s real, but it’s all in a kind of...pocket, if you like.”

“Ok,” A half convinced Pixi sits up again and gets given her jeans. She throws her legs off the side of the bed and the Boy steps back to give her room to stand up. She takes her time though, mulling over the notion for a moment or two. “So...wait whose dream is it then. Yours or mine?”

“Does it matter?”

“Nah. Guess not.” Slipping her feet into her jeans, Pixi stands as she pulls them up, and zips and buttons. She notices then that dream or not, the Boy looks away while she’s dressing. It makes her smile. “So,” she sits back down on the side of the bed, “you been ok?” What she actually wants to say is ‘are you better now?’, ‘thank God you’re alive!’, ‘I thought I’d never see you again!’ and some such. Yet these things are too many and two loud in their desperation for Pixi to get out all at once.

“Eh?”

“I mean how are things?”

“That’s all you have to say? I come all the way out here in my comatose state, and you ask me how things are?”

“Did you say comatose?”

“Great, thanks. The weather’s quite good round our parts this year too. Everything’s peachy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be. But not for being insensitive. But for being emotionally constipated.”

“Sorry,” Pixi hangs her head. The encouragement to be honest makes her feel like crying again but she holds back. “I missed you very much. And I haven’t really been myself since...” The Boy has come to sit by her side again. He puts his arm around her.

“Hey, chin up,” he smiles. “You’re stronger than anyone gives you credit for, you know that?” Pixi nods sheepishly, wishing it were true. ‘Thank you’, she wants to say, but can’t say it because of the great many things she wants to thank him for, and not quite knowing where to start. “Any way, we haven’t much time.”

“For what?”

“To be here. And I still need to keep my promise to you,” he stands up and considers the room like he’s looking for something.

“Ok,” Pixi follows suit, and he takes her hand.

“This way,” he leads. Together, like their taking a stroll in the park, they start walking towards the bathroom which smells like the changing cubicles at Jumeirah beach.

“Where are we going?” Pixi asks, and they halt just as she does, so that she thinks she spoilt whatever it was they were doing. “Sorry!” She says, “I won’t say another word.” But the Boy doesn’t seem bothered. He’s still measuring things up in his mind.

“Can I borrow your lipstick or something?”

“Eh?”

“I need to draw.”

“When have you ever seen me with lipstick on?”

“Well you got something else I can use?”

“Eyeliner?”

“That’ll do.”

Pixi goes to fetch the pencil case she uses as a makeup case from her rucksack. In a minute, she’s by his side again, holding out the little bit whot remains of her eyeliner, like a keen student. Taking it, the Boy bends down again and draws a straight line on the carpet.

“Damn, won’t be using that again,” Pixi mumbles.

“About time you bought a new one any way, not much left of it is there?” The Boy gives the eyeliner back to a shrugging Pixi who slips it in her side-pocket. “Here we go,” he says, taking her hand again. They take a few steps backwards and then resume their walk. When both of them set foot over the line, they’re no longer in the dingy, Bahrain hotel room.

As far as conclusions go, this is as good as they come. And as good as they come is enough for Pixi later on. When the year of the ShiKt fades out without objection. When, like a thing that has exhausted itself after doing its absolute worst, there is something beautiful in its going; as if it were sorry. And when Pixi will raise her gaze to the sky, as she does on this night, to appreciate lanterns instead of fireflies. It will be enough.

It begins, round about the time Pixi starts losing track of all the many things about 夢幻 that touch her. It, whot begins, is the making of a decision. It concerns immigrating. Finally and at long last. It befalls like a reaction at first, to many things. One of them is a desperate and self-destructive need to deal herself the greatest of severings. And in the spirit of severings it will involve another, drastic shearing of the mane Pixi has grown over the years of growing out the choppy marring of her femininity when all this first started. The second of the many things to react to is 夢幻. Pixi tells him her decision in a sadistic attempt to nip something potentially fantastic in the bud. She is blunt and ruthless.

“I’m going away to Turkey,” she says and though there’s been no confessions to date (the point here being to prevent any) 夢幻’s face, when she says it, is confession enough. What he says next is icing on the cake.

“Don’t.”

“You should be encouraging me! You inspired this with your stories of epic escape and your adventurous spirit. It’s my turn now and my tribute to you. I’m too old and two young.” To this 夢幻 looks disgusted at himself, and the under-breath profanities which follow say as much about how royally pissed off he is at his luck.

“Stay with me,” he blurts suddenly, pulling a rug out from under Pixi’s black-eyed strength and reserve.

“I can’t,” she says weakly.

“Stay with me.”

“I’ll go mad here. I’m slowly going mad.”

“Stay with me.”

“...”

When the dynamics of their relationship changes thus, the decision also changes from a reaction to something heavy with responsibility. It becomes smoke tinged like the sky above no-man’s land with the struggle between her reason and the feelings that are creeping up on her. One tells her she is blind if she can’t see that history is repeating itself, and the other is banging pots and pans like a demented idiot, but because it doesn’t give a shiKt what anyone thinks of it, it’s so damn cool. Like 夢幻. And God knows Pixi wants to jump his band wagon.

She wants to shed her cynicism and go skinny dipping in the fountain of youthful, inspired insights about the world. Everything looks more beautiful through his eyes. The hopeful Artiste, it transpires, is also a closet poet of sorts. And it drives Pixi mad thinking of what it is about her that he is so smitten by.

But on the eve of 2011, as the London skyline lights up in a mute display of fireworks, and overhead fire-lanterns float upwards into the night sky like silent, surfacing jelly fish, 夢幻 stealthily takes Pixi’s hand into his at the stroke of midnight. Not satisfied, he slips her armour ring off her middle finger, as gently as if he were undressing her, and passes the bulky thing into his other hand, to better intertwine his fingers with hers. Pixi realises then that she is in very real danger of being in love and her incentive to go away metamorphosises again into something about self preservation. I won’t give up on myself -it goes.

“I’m going to have my first cigarette of the year,” 夢幻 announces after they have detached themselves. Purposely and with the indulgence of a Murakami protagonist, he takes a rolly from his pocket, inserts it between his lips and lights it. The first drag has the look of a thing that is marking a new beginning for him. Pixi watches him, and he watches her watching him. “Want to twos?” he offers, using the slang he is picking up from her. She refuses. On her mind is more important matters. It concerns him, and it has just dawned on her in remembrance of a pre-communication.

Had the Boy known? Pixi thinks. Or did he simply see where she was going, and want to release her from the memory of himself and the grip of that phantom which had cast a shadow over her life?

“Sometimes you look so sad,” 夢幻 says, reaching out for her hand again.

“Mmmm,” she shakes her head, breaking her gaze from his in the process. “I’m not sad.” They begin to walk, and Pixi makes another decision, to accompany the first. I won’t give up on you –this one goes. I won’t give up on myself and I won’t give up on you. What a pair. “I’m going to go away,” she affirms.

“Ok,” is his response. It seems confident and accepting. “You should go. But I’m going to wait for you. Trust me.”

“Ok,” she nods. Though what she actually wants to say is, I’ll wait for you as well. No matter though, because their language barrier seems to have helped them establish some alternative mode of communication through telepathy, and so he knows what she means.

In Which There’s the Beginning of the Journey Back Home and Two Eartquakes

2012-01-06T12:18:00.000-08:00

On the way back to the castle, Pixi takes a detour and ends up on some other hilltop, from whence she can observe the landscape. Al-Aqazam’s kingdom spans three different climates which exist simultaneaously alongside one another. Desert (in which she’s standing in now), Lush-Greenwood and some Snow-Blizzardy place Pixi wouldn’t fancy exploring.

It’s like a pie chart, with the three terrains are separated as if by some magic barrier though brought together. Right in the centre where the ends of each pie-slice meet, and enjoying a slice of every climate in its varying parts, is the massive castle, and Pixi’s destination. Considerring it for a moment, and trying to deduce where her and La-lu’s room is placed, she wonders who on earth would be willing to occupy those rooms facing the arctic wasteland. Little does she think that with Djinn having a naturally firey disposition, their preferred weather is the cold after all.

No, Pixi is too busy wishing then, to think this. She wishes she could stay long enough to know this place better. She wishes she could have seen the wolves which the Boy spoke of. And she wishes she could see him well before bidding goodbye for good.

Later, when at some ungodly hour of the morning Pixi finally gets back to her room, with puffy red eyes and a snot clogged nose, La-lu is sitting up in the bed next to hers. She too is wishing much of the abovementioned.

“Where’ve you been? Mihrimah said the Hadarah finished at 10pm.”

“I..” Pixi halts to clear her throat in order to not sound teary. “I was smoking with Al-Aqazam.”

“For four hours?”

“And then I went for a walk.” Pixi goes to the cupboard where she finds a clean, white night-dress waiting for her to change into. It is identical to the one La-lu is wearing. She considers showering before bed, but thinks better of it. She’s too tired. “Any way, you’re one to talk! What have you been up to?”

“Sight seeing. The Emerald Quarries were lovely!” La-lu beams, but then the beam dims in an instant. “We have to go back tomorrow you know. Jaa-Qin came by our room two hours ago to say that Al-Aqazaam gave the order.”

“I know,” says Pixi turning her back to La-lu as she pulls off her top and pulls on the night-dress. “I heard it from him personally.”

“Did he tell you anything about the Boy?”

“No,” Pixi removes her jeans from under the dress and hangs them on the back of a chair.

“Oh my days,” La-lu watches her friend slip into the bed next to hers. “Pixi you can’t leave without saying goodbye. He saved our lives.” She lies on her side facing Pixi. “And we were supposed to be saving his!”

“He’s not here, La-lu. I can’t say goodbye to him anyway,” is Pixi’s response as she burrows her face into a fantastically soft pillow, to stifle back the tears which threaten to re-emerge. Then as if cast under a spell, sleep comes to them instantly. When it does, both La-lu and Pxi have an unsaid sentence each, waiting on their respective tongues. But once their heads are down, the two drift off within seconds.

I must be shattered, is Pixi’s last thought, while La-lu’s is something related to Jaa-Qin and his biceps. Little do either of them know, that earlier in the evening when the 6^th floor chamber-maid came to clean their room and change their sheets, she screwed up the only executive decision she had to make that day. Instead of plain pillowcases, she used ones scented with lavender and various other herbs unknown to man, which cause instant relaxation for Djinn. But for humans, in the best cases they cause drowsiness, and in the worst, they quite simply knock people out as would chloroform.

Needless to say, the next morning both girls oversleep. When Mihrimah comes to shake them awake, they rise with a headache each and act suspiciously hung over. Mihrimah takes the opportunity to investigate their bedding when Pixi stumbles into the shower singing Halleluja and La-lu stares out the window in a daze with her night-dress half over her head. The fool, Mihrimah thinks of the chamber-maid when her suspicions prove correct. Quickly she goes to fetch some fresh lemon and soda to revive the two.

After a late breakfast on the Eastern patio, which enjoys a balmy warmth all year round, a near-tearful goodbye session commences in the courtyard. During this, La-lu loses her reserve and surprises Jaa-Qin with one of her painful hugs. Pixi, on the other hand, bids her farewells rather distractedly, as she keeps looking about her in wait of her Boy or Al-Aqazam at least, with some news of him. Neither materialise though.

When the Djinn bring forth the monstrous beast that is supposed to be one of their horses, La-lu near runs for cover under Jaa-Qin’s arm while Pixi can’t wait to get on the thing to get away before she breaks down in tears in front of God and all His Djinn. The animal on the other hand, seems to share La-lu’s sentiments. Double saddled and harnessed, it huffs and wheezes nervously, as if it weren’t the one towering eight feet over Pixi and La-lu, spewing spray on them with every breath.

Jaa-Qin has it blindfolded, which calms it down a tad. But as soon as its passengers mount, it becomes irritable again. To remedy this, they bring the carcass of some sort of bovine creature, and hoist it onto the back of the horse to mask Pixi and La-lu’s smell and presence with that of death. It works.

“When you reach the hills of Shablus,” Jaa-Qin points sombrely southwards, and it doesn’t escape Pixi that La-lu is also a sombre. “The South-Eastern wind will be furious at this time of day, and it will make her spirited. Within moments, she would have reached her full speed, so you must hold on tight, and keep your eyes closed,” he instructs severely so that both of them nod with violent earnestness and apprehension. “Also, her name is Deh-Deh-Duldul. Never say it!”

“You just have,” La-lu says.

“I’m her master. The consequences will be disastrous if you do.”

“Ah,” they both nod again, without having understood at all.

Then without warning or a final moment to hold someone’s gaze or say a parting prayer, Jaa-Qin slaps Deh-Deh-Duldul’s posterior. The beast breaks out into a gallop that would have sent both Pixi and La-lu flying off, if they weren’t harnessed to her saddle. In an instant the Djinn, the castle and the surrounding rock-hills among which Pixi wandered aimlessly the night before, are miles behind them.

“Hey,” Pixi yells backwards, once she’s confident that she isn’t going to fall. “What happened between you two?”

“Nothing,” La-lu swallows a gust of air when she opens her mouth to speak.

“It didn’t look that way. Don’t you like him?”

“Yeah he’s really nice, but,”

“But?”

“Pixi, he has a tail!”

“Hah!” Pixi throws her head back and chuckles. “And to him, you don’t have one, right?”

“Precisely.”

“Such is life.”

When they reach the hills of Shablus, they are greeted by a violent gust, and Deh-Deh-Duldul does exactly what Jaa-Qin said she would. Pixi and La-lu hold on to her for dear life, and keep their eyes tightly closed. They miss, in the process, the sublime scenery which unfolds before them as the Djinn horse’s speed welds the terrific distance between the two worlds into something that looks like the death of a supernova. Just as well they don’t see it, for fear it might blow their minds or deem them forever disappointed by the drabness of the world they must return to.

And speak of the devil, the drab world welcomes La-lu and Pixi like an open armed sleaze, when back in Petra Deh-Deh-Duldul slows to a stop. The girls dismount, and as Jaa-Qin instructed, struggle to pull the carcass off its back. As soon as they succeed, the two run for cover as if from a hand grenade they just chucked. Still blindfolded, Deh-Deh-Dudul sniffs and kicks about a bit. Her right ear twitches, her mouth chews inanely, and then she gets it into her head that she’ll be returning home now. With that, she’s gone in an instant.

La-lu and Pixi remain crouching behind a bolder which hid them, watching the space the Djinn horse just vacated. It is deceitful, like our notion of reality. No strange current buzzes in the air, no smell or special radiance, not a trace of the world that has touched them so irrevocably. Hauling their rucksacks onto their backs, the two girls share an emptiness neither knows how to voice, on their long trek back through Petra park to Edom hotel.

When they walk into the loby looking the mess that they do, the sun is setting. Luw and Dee and Glorious welcome them with a great deal of relief and also a little resentment which is mutual to the girls. The stealthy theif has laid his dagger on those bonds which held them together. Now the world will revolve in different directions for each of them, and no one can be to blame.

As Pixi and La-lu freshen up in the bathroom, the guys settle the bill at the reception and arrange for a cab. The driver promises to get them back to civilization in time for the world cup finals that night. On the drive back, he joins in as they all give voice to cheering on for Netherlands or Spain, as if Netherlands and Spain could hear them and actually gave a toss. But as the endless stretch of road eats away at what remains of the day without showing much sign of ending, and darkness falls on the landscape outside, everyone grows pensive.

Eventualy Dee and Luw ask questions, and La-lu gives them an update. Her enthusiasm returns to her somewhat as she recounts their adventures after the separation, and her audience marvel at the details of the dangers they overcame and then Al-Aqazam’s kingdom. The driver, who tries to evesdrop with his limited understanding of English, decides what he decided when he was cheering on with them after Spain and Netherlands: crazy. Glorious on the other hand listens quietly from the front passenger seat, his resentment growing somewhat.

In the side view mirror he notices Pixi’s palour and watches her eyelids fall heavy with the dew of some unremarkable remorse. And he decides that letting her sleep would be kinder than asking her what is wrong. Doubtless the world will miss nothing if it weren’t to know, and Pixi would feel no more ease in sharing it. In the months which follow, Pixi will return the favour, thinking her comforting is the last thing Glorious will want in his time of mourning. She will think wrong. Glorious from her is a diferrent breed all together. What she’d want in a state of devastation is never the same as what he does.

Five minutes into the game, they finally reach Amman. The race to get within close proximity of a television screen ends with them grabbing an outdoor table at a caffe bustling with all walks of life. Young people boast their fanaticism with hooligan whoops and team paraphernalia; couples cheer holding hands; far-from-demure Arab women bounce about and bust out the zargutaa every time the cheering erupts; older men stroke moustaches and play backgammon during lulls. Pixi can barely see the screen nearest them. There is a fat lady who sways from side to side blocking her line of vision, so that she has to keep adjusting her seat.

La-lu, who has a better view, follows the game a little more keenly, with Luw trying to explain to her what ‘off-side’ means. Glorious and Dee are stoic, like their lives depended on the outcome of the match. Every so often one of them orders tea, fresh juice, mediocre ice-cream or sheisha, but none of these things satiate their hunger. So during half time, they all up and go looking for somewhere with real food and more visible screens. They end up in Pizza Hut.

The place is near empty, with only three tables occupied. Staff stand around swatting flies as they watch the game on the large screen in front of which the five take a table. They order pizza and Pixi, who grabs a plate of salad from the God-awful salad bar, remembers why she’d sworn off the place even before she got diagnosed with a wheat allergy.

The game commences, but Pixi, try as she might to follow it, loses interest. Barely keeping up her eyelids, she pushes a bell-pepper slice about the remants of dressing in her plate, when Spain scores the winning goal. Pandemonium breaks loose on the streets of Amman.

This is how Pixi’s Boy lets her go. And it’s ok, because life, in its kind cruelty, seldom gives us dramatic goodbyes, or heroic walk-offs into a distant sunset. Often, the significant moments pass us by in the blink of an eye, and we realise sometime, some day, in some sadder future, that there was the closure for that chapter of our lives. It was as poetic as they come, but we didn’t notice it at the time.

Similarly, only in retrospect will Pixi be able to make sense of how it all ended. And only through hindsight will she understand the things the Boy wanted to say to her, when months later he wakes her in some dingy hotel-room in Bahrain, between missed connecting flights. At the time, a travel-weary Pixi thinks being stranded in Bahrain is rotten luck and a waste of her life. She thinks this like a stupid bereft of the wisdom of resignation. Because what it actually is, as the Boy will also tell her, is a pocket.

It is the borrowed space inbetween the places she aught to have been, the borrowed time between the time-differrences which were delayed in ejecting her from or admitting her into their realms. It is a pothole in the plan, a glitch in the natural flow. And in that glitch afforded them by some mircle disguised as misfortune, Pixi and the Boy that never was, are able to steal a moment to finally say thier goodbyes. And in that glitch also, Pixi will know, without knowing, that before the year is out, she will fall one more time. Into love.

And this is how:

***

The end of the year of the ShiKt rolls in like a snowball collecting mass, collecting momentum on its descent off fate’s mountain face. During what remains of its time, it heralds three births, two weddings and a death, respectively. First Goth-Bunny has a boy, Little-Chink has a girl and Xarina has another. Then Taz and A have a wedding in Dier Azour, and of course Big-sis and Kalahili have one in Amman. And finally on an unsuspected morning, Glorious’s father has the notion that his Lord has just summoned him back home. In the arms of the wife he loved as violently as he would never admit, he shuts his eyes to this world. Afterwards, Pixi wants to be there for Glorious, but doesn’t know how. And so Glorious forgives her a little less because of it.

The final curtain call is a redundancy. The year whot started with Pixi unemployed, promises further Shiktness by ensuring that she is in the same state before it says goodbye. On December 10 2010 Pixi’s Line-Manager tells her he has bad news and good news.

“Which would you like first?” he sits down on the two seater in the meeting room.

“The Bad news,”

“We have to let you go. You can take next week off if you like.”

Pixi has just pulled up a chair across from him, and made her self uncomfortable in it. She shrugs at this royal be-screwing and tries to seem understanding and compassionate. “I understand, don’t worry,” She says, “And the good news?”

“I can carry on giving you some free-lance work.”

Later when she relates the incident to Xeph, he will justifiably say, ‘that wasn’t bad news and good news, it was bad news and mideocre news!’ But at the time, Pixi shrugs at it also. She knows the free-lance work will never materialise, just as her contract didn’t materialise over the course of her 7 months there, nor eventually will her P45 or letter of reffrence (as promised by the HR dude.) She adds Muslim Unprofessionals to her list of people who spoil a good thing for the rest of us, and promises herself she’ll never work for them again.

While Pixi is busy losing her job, 夢幻, unbeknownst to her, is busy turning 27 and bitching about how he has no need for relationships in his life. The next day the two meet again. It all begins like this and it’s like global warming on amphetamine:

The three year-old ice-caps in Pixi’s inconsolable centre melt and 夢幻 eats his own words. Their logic and defences are all but exhausted. And the powers of retrospect dot a bee-line between the events which threw into motion a thing Pixi would have avoided like the plague, had she been given a choice.

Actually, that’s a lie. This is how it all ends. In fact, it all begins like this. Rewind:

Among the mysteries of life’s kind cruelty,

One earthquake takes
Another gives back.

Do such things need to be made sense of?

On 17^th of August 1999, an earthquake measuring 7.6 magnitude on the Richter scale, hit Sakarya along its course of destruction throughout North Western Turkey. It claimed over 15,000 lives. Among them was Bilal Savsar, may God rest his soul.

Bilal was 18, Pixi 16, and her family had been in Sakarya visiting his the very day before. She hadn’t got to see him that day, though her heart had been full to bursting with the anticipation of it. She hadn’t seen him since before puberty hit them both, a lifetime ago of playing in sand pits and scowling at each other from opposite ends of vicious childhood feuds conducted during ex-pat dinner parties in Riyadh. Ode to the serious lives of children when parents are aschmoozing.

The bus journey to Istanbul on the day of the earthquake had afforded a sobering glimpse at the destruction wrecked across the country. It had turned homes and buildings into rubble; factories into fire breathing, smoke belching creatures; roads bore gaping wounds and mosques stood apologetic without minarets in every village they passed. On the flight to London later that afternoon, Pixi wept though she didn't know yet that she had lost someone dear. Those tears were like the tears she would shed on the 91 bus the day of Madamme Butterfly, when the Boy would leave her to make her big mistakes alone. They were for the pain of the loss of childhood's first love, and perhaps for the birth pangs of a yearning that would be conceived of it. Afterwards, she never wept again, because she never had the right to, and that’s probably what made all the difference.

Four years prior to the Turkey earthquake of 99, the girl that lived on the second floor of their apartment asked 夢幻 if he’d meet her behind their building, after school the following day. She'd spent weeks rehearsing her confession, and barely got a wink of sleep that night. 12 year old 夢幻, on the other hand, though not completely oblivious to her feelings, slept very well. But he woke earlier than usual, when the first tremors hit Kobe on the 17^th of January 1995. 夢幻’s father abandoned his attempt to get to work that morning when the road under his feet came to life, and twisting this-way-and-that like a giant serpent, collapsed onto itself. Moments later he was back home, running up and down six flights of stairs to evacuate his family.

It took 20 seconds. And those 20 seconds took 6,434 lives. In the chaotic days which followed, government relief was sporadic and poorly organised. The Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza syndicate stepped in to provide emergency aid to homeless survivors. Schools were closed, and when they’d reopen months later, too many students would return to half empty classes. 夢幻’s family spent a week in his father’s warehouse, waiting out the aftershocks, one day, one shock after another. And then they moved. Needless to say, 夢幻 failed to keep his appointment on the 17^th of January, behind their apartment building. He never saw that girl again.

Yet the world does not come to a standstill after such things. Life continues without so much as batting an eyelid. The earth revolves in blissful ignorance, and half way across the world, an equally 12 year-old Pixi, and the half-Djinn that adopted her, draw sea-monsters on the tiles of the back patio, counting falls, counting self-harm scars, counting disorders into an awkward adolescence.

In Japan, as the wounds of the Great Hanshin Earthquake slowly mend, 夢幻 emerges from childhood on a fishing vessel. On it he learns how to sleep in the least comfortable places through bad weather and over the din of a monstrous engine. He learns camaraderie and friendship among the delinquents, social outcasts and Burakumin who work for his father. Through unkindness and exploitation he forges his own sense of justice and compassion. He creates his own codes and a sense of poetry alien to his kin, until estrangement gives him a strange seeking and a new family among friends. He talks like a fisherman, walks like a fisherman, smokes like a fisherman, eyes squinting and fag pinched between thumb and index finger. But he sees the world like a child. He counts his work scars and his fight scars like a tally for some sentence that needs fulfilling, and all the while trains his eyes on the open horizon at sea, as though waiting for something.

On the opposite end of that horizon, Pixi on roof-tops, returns the gaze. When Bilal Savsar dies she carries the silent scar of him into a marred view of life...or perhaps a flawless one of a flawed world. In every place she lays down her loads to call home, that scar is like a compulsive tugging between her breast bones. It beats sadly like a second heart. It tries to tell her that this is not where she belongs. And then one day, it simply stops.

Perhaps Pixi has the Boy that Never Was to thank for it. Perhaps it was he that set her deamons to rest. But as is the nature of the world, it stops at the most convenient of times, and cruelly lets Pixi believe in second chances.

‘Metaphors are dangerous,’ Milan Kundira once wrote. ‘Love begins with metaphor.’

Fast-forward.

In Which There is a Hiatus

2011-04-21T01:47:00.000-07:00

Reason One: Pixi and the Boy That Never Was is currently undergoing painful revisions in its attempt to become and all singing all dancing novel. If you like what you've read so far and want to see more, please support the work by 'following' this blog.

In Which the Heart of the Universe Beats and then There is Al-Aqazam

2010-12-22T17:42:00.000-08:00

It is a fantastically beautiful summer night that only a world so fantastically removed from ours can produce. In it, three shadows stand in a lamp-lit courtyard, and one can tell by their stances that the topic of discussion is a weighty one. It stems from this: Pixi's attempts to see the Boy have ended in bitter failure.

What is most frustrating though is that no one has told her anything about how he's doing. True to La-lu's word, all she ever finds out is that he's in intensive care and visits aren't allowed.

"What does that mean, that they're still trying to fix him?" she pleads to Ja-Qin

"..."

"Or is he fixed and healing?"

"..."

"Are the doctors hopeful?"

"..."

"Ja-Qin, you're rubbish!" this from La-lu who's stood by watching her friend’s questions go unresponded to one after another.

"I'm sorry," he finally speaks, hands helplessly burrowed deep into his pockets. "I do not know."

"Can't we find out?" asks La-lu.

"No."

"Why?"

"Because."

"That's not a reason."

"Listen, all I can say is that if they're keeping his situation under wraps -which they are and nervously so, mind you- then it is serious. It is very serious. He may very well die."

Pixi is quiet. She feels like her stomach has sunk into her gut, and with it, she sinks to the ground. An hour ago, the sound of the adhaan announced the end of the day, with some nostalgic timber. On that note, a gradual and balmy dusk has indulged in settling over the castle grounds. Now, Pixi’s gaze gets lost in the moonlight that’s spilling into the tiled courtyard as it rises.

“That's very consoling, Jaa-Qin," La-lu’s sarchastic reproach stings a tad. Sinking to Pixi’s side, she puts a hand on Pixi’s shoulder and then adds a, "Thanks," for emphasis.

"You wanted a response!"

"Listen, Pixi,” La-lu says to her friend. “Don't worry."

"How?" Pixi looks to La-lu like she'd genuinely like to know, her eyes big and full of fearful anxiety. La-lu has no answer.

"Hey, do you guys know how..." Ja-Qin trails off, expecting them to deduce his meaning. Both stare at him a little vacantly. "You know, how he knew."

"Knew?" they ask simultaneously. A light breeze carries jasmine to their noses, but no one pays it the attention it deserves.

"Qiraan's name."

"We all knew Qiraan's name,” says La-lu. “Didn't you?"

"Jeez...you two don't have a clue do you? I thought maybe it had something to do with Pixi," Jaa-Qin removes one hand from his pocket to brush back his hair a little nervously before resuming his pocketful stance. He’s nervous about possibly being on the verge of disclosing too much to the bint-Naas, but the generally more dominating mature-calm in his character shrugs its shoulders and decides it ought to be ok.

"Have a clue about what?" Pixi presses.

"He knew Qiraan's name.” Ja-Qin’s voice comes down a notch nonetheless, and it doesn’t escape Pixi’s notice that he’s just thrown a cautious glance about them. “His real name. That's how he finished him off." La-lu looks to Pixi as if to say 'eh?' but it is not in her nature to do so. "Do you understand?" Jaa-Qin asks. Pixi does.

"Because everything has a real name,” she offers numbly, “and if you know it you have power over it."

"Exactly."

"Since when?" La-lu looks left out. "Is it a magic thing?"

"It's an ancient law of the universe thing," Ja-Qin explains. "A thing has as many names as is languages spoken and cultures relevant to its existence. But there is one Tongue, the ancient and timeless Tongue of creation, and very few are privy to it."

"Are humans privy to it?"

"Sure, man was the first to be taught it. When God told Adam to recite the name of things in heaven, the angels whot doubted God's new creation were humbled by Adam’s wisdom. They had never been taught such things. Their purpose never demanded the need to posses it."

"So how did you guys learn?"

"We didn't," is the response. "Only an enlightened or inspired few has ever known because they know not to use it...and of course, some Ifrits."

"Ifrits?" La-lu is getting a crash-course in the mysterious.

"Dark Ones. Qiraan's kind," Pixi offers, morosely.

"But Qiraan wasn't always dark. He deserted and turned Ifrit." Jaa-Qin corrects. "The Dark Ones have the wisdom that Iblis accumulated in heaven when he was once good. And also the knowledge passed down from their crooked ancestors who learnt from Harut and Marut."

"Sounds like they have some advantages over us," La-lu gives up trying to understand everything Jaa-Qin is spewing, and decides to settle instead on the gist she’s getting. And the gist she’s getting makes her worried.

"Nah, never," he consoles cheerfuly. "We got the Creator of the universe and its laws on our side. The Prince proved that when he defeated Qiraan." Jaa-Qin’s enthusiasm is wasted on the girls. La-lu and Pixi are silent and sombre, respectively. "Pixi, come now.” Jaa-Qin takes his hands out if his pockets and crouches to place his left on her right other shoulder. Pixi now possesses a one on each. More than consoling, they feel heavy and make her slouch all the more. “You should take comfort in that knowledge,"

"For sooth," a familiar female voice announces the arrival of its owner, who comes out from behind the fountain Pixi is leaning against. The three of them look up to find Mihrimah, prim and proper in particularly pretty robes.

"Hey, Mihrimah," greets La-lu.

"Yes? What?" asks Mihrimah, who is unfamiliar with this form of greeting.

"I mean, ‘Hi’. Hello."

"Oh, hello," she says, and then, "I'm late for the Hadra. Does anyone care to join me so I don't have to make an embarrassing appearance on my lonesome?"

"Nah, we'll pass. I'm promised to show La-lu around the emerald quarries."

"Pixi?" Mihrimah appears desperate enough to press Pixi who is full on the verge of labouring forth an attack of anxious despair. Or perhaps that’s exactly why she presses her.

"Eh?"

"Care to join me?"

"You should go, Pixi," Jaa-Qin encourages. "It'll do you good. And I bet it's like no Hadra you've ever seen."

On their way, Mihrimah explains to Pixi that Al-Aqazam's people are disciples of the school of Naqshiband. It surprises Pixi to learn that Djinn would follow human schools of Sufism.

"Don’t call it Sufism, Pixi! Don’t call it Sufism!” Mihrimah suddenly snaps a little passionately.

“Eh?”

“They’ve pissed on that fire too!”

“Well what do we call it then?”

“Nothing. We are nothing.”

Pixi’s silence is one of appreciation. She knows that Mihrimah is right, and had long since been considering the notion of adding ‘Sufi-Separatists’ with theyr ‘Look at me, look at me, I’m like a religious hippy!!’ attitude, to her list of idiots who ruin a good thing for the rest of us. That attention seeking never did sit well with self-efacement being the whole object.

"The Prophet's bloodline,” Mihrimah offers, returning to Pixi’s original surprise over Djinn’s embracing human schools. “-May God’s peace be upon him, continues in man, not us.” Her voice has softened and bears a tinge of regret over her sudden flare. “And so does the inspiration of his love. The greatest Awliya of time have always had disciples from the Djinn."

When the two reach the sight of the Hadra, it has already begun. An open field is occupied by a sea of Djinn. They are organised in halaqas -circle within circle within circle as far as the eye can see. The two sit among the congregants of the outer most circle and join the chant, lending voice to the rhythmic breathing which sounds more and more like the swish of a giant sword cutting through the air. There is an electric current in the atmosphere, like the beginnings of a great storm. Above the furthest and innermost circle a hurricane has begun to brew. Like a monstrous energy field it grows with the chanting until eventually the whole sky is blotted out by its twisting currant. When Pixi sees it right above them, her heart feels like it will implode out of a combination of fear and awe. So she closes her eyes. When the dhikr reaches its climax they are all caught in the midst of a mighty wind which envelopes them into the growing eye of the hurricane. And Pixi feels like a drop in the ocean, beating along with the heart of the universe.

***

Pixi's perch overlooks the pool of moon-light which fills the mountain top and paints in ghostly hues an ancient temple carved into the rock face across from her ledge. Leaning against a big rock, Pixi sings in the warmth of the summer night air, and simultaneously picks at a knee-scab. Little does she know that she has an audience. When the audience has spent enough time not being noticed by the oblivious Pixi, it emits a cough from its giant throat. The throat belongs to Al-aqazam. Pixi has not yet met him, but she had seen him at the Hadra earlier. Mihrimah pointed him out to her, after the dhikr was finished, and Pixi was only able to sneak a brief glance before he turned his gaze in her direction and put a childish fear in her.

"Oh...ummm..." Now Pixi gets to her feet immediately, with one trouser leg still rolled up over her knee. For want of knowing what the proper thing to do is, she bows deeply.

"What are you bowing for?" Al-aqazam booms, not because he's angry but because he's so big that everything he says sounds like the churning of a great volcanic mountain's bowels. "Stuuupid girl." he comes near Pixi and gestures for her to sit back down, and then when she has he folds his two massive tails under him and sits down beside her.

The rock they are both leaning against creaks a little ominously but it holds its weight against theirs. Next to Al-aqazam, Pixi is like a weedy, little 10 year-old. She clasps her hands together between her legs and stares down at them nervously. Then a scuttling announces the arrival of Al-aqazam's servants. They bring with them a giant sheisha emitting the sweetest smell Pixi has ever smelled. Al-aqazam takes a few puffs to test it and when it meets his approval he turns to Pixi.

"Do you smoke, girl?"

"Ummm, sometimes...when I'm angry or upset."

"Pah!" he smiles. "Stuuupid girl. That is the worst time to smoke. Smoking is a thing one should do when one is content. Here," he offers his pipe to Pixi. "Try this." Pixi nods gratefully as she takes the pipe and then a tentative drag. The taste of the smoke far out-weighs its delicious smell.

"Wow," she mouthes a wow-full of smoke. "It's so yummy!"

"Zindik!" Al-akazam calls to one of the two servants standing some distance away. "Bring the girl a pipe."

The pipe materialises very quickly, and after Zindik has inserted it into the sheisha's second vent, Al-akazam offers it to Pixi. "Here, girl, I will teach you something of the joys of smoking."

"It's delicious," Pixi says after her second drag.

"They collect it from the balm that the DimDim tree emits when its bark is covered in due." Al-aqazam puffs with a squint in his right eye. "When that stupid boy was an infant," he begins to reminisce about the childhood of his nephew, "he used to sniff out the jars of balm in the castle storehouse and eat them secretly. I knew from then he had no hope of being anything other than stupid."

Pixi cringes sadly at this, and the sadness gives her courage to speak.

"Are you so very angry at him?"

"No," Al-aqazam says simply.

"Are you angry at his mother?"

He ponders this one a bit before answering, "No." some silence follows and then he continues, "How could I be? I loved her so much." They both take a deep, contemplative drag then, and emit the sweet smelling smoke into the night air. "You remind me of her, you know. You probably also remind him of her, but he doesn't know it because he was too young when she passed."

"How so?"

"How did she pass?"

"No, how do I remind you of her?"

Al-Aqazam peers at Pixi a few times thoughtfully before answering, "She was like a boy. No fear, no reservation, no sense of carefulness. She would hurtle ahead as if her frail body was utterly expendable,” he pauses to take another toke. “And she was so slim, it would hurt even to watch her run. I would think, 'slow down Ezeqiel. Please slow down or you will break.' but my thoughts and words never reached her." Pixi hangs her head a little ashamed that it is all her reckless qualities that remind him of his sister. "But," he continues. "She was the best Star-Chaser I have ever known in my lifetime...and I have lived a long time, girl."

"What's a Star-Chaser?"

"..." Al-aqazam blinks at Pixi a few times, and then he really booms, "He did not tell you anything about himself or his family?!" Little pebbles dislodge from the crevices of the rock they're leaning against and rain down on them.

"He told me some!" Pixi shields her head. "Log-Keepers...you're Log-Keepers..." she offers the some menial details she'd picked up from her first encounter with Qiraan, to pacify him. "I just never understood what you kept a log of!" when Pixi unshields her face she finds Al-aqazam puffing smoke again with restored calm. "Shooting stars," he says.

"Eh?"

"Tell me girl, what causes a star to fall into our world?"

"Well actually they're meteoroids aren't they? Bits of rock that burn up as they fall through our atmosphere?"

"So why do these rocks hurtle into our atmosphere, as you say?"

"..."

"They are ammunition and shrapnel."

"From what?"

"From the heavens defending themselves against our kind."

"I don't understand."

"Since the times of yore, the Ifrit used to ascend into the sky in the shadow of night. They would climb just beneath the first barrier, and there they would eavesdrop on the inception of fates as they are recorded into the great book of fates."

"Why?"

"To do mischief and to feed the black-market of the occult."

"Oh."

"But things changed when the appointed time of the final Prophet's birth came. The great defence-wall was put up to end the stealing of hidden knowledge. A falling star is what happens now, when the Dark Ones still attempt this. The heavenly fire-rocks rain down on the thieves."

"So your people keep a log of every breach of the wall?"

"We record it. And we watch them," Al-aqazam points at the sky with his pipe, his eyes gazing over the stars as though making sure they are all in place. "And we know where they will land. If it is within our terrain, we give chase to the star and its target. It is our responsibility to punish dissenters and knowledge-thrives that have strayed into our terrain."

"Wow," Pixi is beside herself with awe. "Why would Qiraan turn to the other side when he comes from such a family as yours?" she says almost to herself.

"Pah!" Al-Aqazaam sneers at his late brother’s name. "He was rotten to the core to begin with, that one. It was a wonder that our Ezeqiel even shared a womb and then the nest with him. They were twin eggs you know. They were alike in appearance also, but in character no two people could ever be more different. Still, Qiraan loved our sister as did I. The only thing I have shared in my life with that boy has been the heart-break of losing her." Al-Aqazaam picks up a pair of golden tongs then and nimbly removes the ash from atop the sheisha. He looks about him as though searching for something on the ground and then picks up a stone which, between his fingers, looks like a pebble. Instantly, the stone combusts into flame, making Pixi flinch with surprise. He puts the burning rock onto the tobacco pot to serve as fresh coal. Pixi remembers a smiliar trick her Boy pulled once, and the memory rends her heart-strings.

"I have wondered often," Al-Aqazam continues after a drag, "'What if?' -But there can be no 'what if?' What is done was meant to be. She followed her course, as a falling star does. And from the way she leapt ahead recklessly, I must always have known where she would land.

"On the night Ezeqiel first disappeared, she was giving chase to a meteor shower with four of our best chasers. Eventually each of them fell behind, with the last one giving up just off the edge of Diyaar-ul Naas."

"Our side?"

"Yes. We are not bound to give chase when the stars fall beyond our lands. And if they fall beyond our dimension, then few will continue the chase. Ezeqiel was one of those few. She was so convinced that the size of the shower indicated a breach too ominous to let pass, she pressed on. She lost her prey in the end. Having to cross over held her up. lt was on that night, as she harvested fall that she was found by an Adam."

Her head light with sheisha and moonlight, Pixi's imagination paints pictures of meteor showers over dewy teal plains and a willowy maiden with wild hair and strange weapons at her thigh, collecting star pieces. She imagines then, a man stumbling upon the curious creature, and wonders what this man was like and if he too had been chasing falling stars that night.

"When she did not return for a week we sent out searchers. No one would have imagined that she'd gone rogue. We simply thought something had happened to her. When they brought her before me in chains and with word of the Adam, I saw red. My condemnation was swift. And because I didn't hear her out, Ezeqiel fled. She knew she was carrying a child, and fled to save its life.

"I did not order for her recapture. I felt her fleeing was the ultimate betrayal to me, and so I assumed she'd turned Ifrit. I was wrong of course. 2 years later, after she had had and weaned her child, she returned in the bleak of winter with the half-breed in her arms. She'd come back for retribution, and wanted to serve her sentence. But the birth, and the years of fending alone had weakened her so much, I knew she was already dying."

How many of us have encountered that moment of selfhood in an entity eliminating instant? The calm, the fullness before a silent destruction of the world as we know it. The giant orb of light, which eats everything in its growth. A blinding blast. The Mushroom cloud. From the depths of the crater, we climb out. But freedom above is a burned and barren land in nuclear-winter darkness as far as the eye can see. The minefield of living is strewn with such encounters, many of our pasts are pockmarked with them. They break and make us. They help us feel and pity more earnestly the plight of a fellow’s sorrowful adventures. And they remind us that we can never cross the threshold of self to truly invade their utter loneliness at that moment.

'I'm sorry' Pixi wants to say, when Al-Aqazam falls silent. But she doesn't because it will sound pathetic. Instead she shares his silence, and thinks of Ezeqiel.

"Some things," Al-Aqazam speaks without warning and startles Pixi a tad in the process when his gurturul voice invades the quiet. "need to be let go of. Some deliberately abandoned. When you leave here tomorrow, Girl, you must not look back."

"T...to..tomorrow? But I-"

"I know what you 'but'. It is for the best. For you, and your friend and for him."
Pixi takes a deep, self-destructive drag of her pipe, and shuts her eyes as she lets the smoke seep into her like the new tide to wash over her mind.

"One day you will kill yourself doing that," says Al-Aqazam, and she opens her eyes to find him peering at her with disapproval.

"Can I see him at least?"

"No," is the instant response. Pixi hangs her head. “Understand this. He is not in a place in which he would like to be seen.”

“Can I ask you for one thing then?”

“You can. But I cannot promise to comply.”

“Can you tell me the truth, is he dying?”

“Girl, only Allah can know that,” he says, and in saying, breathes life into an inconclusive closure which will forever be beautifully apologetic. And the rest will be history, as they say, faster than anyone can know it. After partaking in another long silence, Pixi bids thanks to her host for the sheisha and the company and for sharing with her the stories of her Boy’s past, even though they must be painful for him to remember. Al-Aqazam tells her to stop being stupid, and then the two bid each other goodbye. A bruised up little Pixi, with posture straight and eyes feigning bravery in spite of their tear-heavy lids. And a giant of an ancient Djinn, sitting cross-legged like a Buddah only not beaming. His eyes glow in the moonlight like her Boy’s used to. His handshake is firm but kind...and probably a tad sorry for this special though stupid, little girl. Puffing the last life out of the dying embers in his sheisha pot, he watches on after Pixi as she trips off into the night. And he thinks to himself, We will meet again, stupid, little girl.

When the great battles are upon us and the two sides bring together the two worlds in combat, and when you have grown up a little more. We will meet again.

And if by some kindness of fate, that stupid boy lives to see the day. Perhaps you may stand side by side again, as brother and sister.

In Which Three Things Happen and One of Them is a Miracle

2010-12-04T09:05:00.000-08:00

Three things happen then.
A Disembodiment occurs.
There is a miracle.
And La-lu saves the day.
In that order.

The disembodiment results in the Boy and Pixi temporarily switching places in the realm of near-death transcendent experience. Which, in your average layman's terms could be grossly simplified as swapping dreamscapes. It becomes possible because ugly human feelings are all in the head. Ugly human feelings like pain, desperation, fear, and rage...they resonate only within the fibres of our being so long as those fibres are still knitted together.

When the pain gets too much for the Djinn-Boy his overwhelmed mind fails itself. The fibres of his being begin to unravel, his presence of consciousness tares at the seams, his essence escapes through a crack from whence shines a light as bright as the sun-shafts that were seeping into the ravine when he last looked up in search of a trace of sky.

On the other side he's on a sea-shore with sand so white it dazzles his eyes. On the not so distant horizon is a boat and on that boat is Kookie's friend DRifter, pulling in his nets. And In the nets, instead of fish, are little glass bottles of various colours which catch the sunlight on their wet surfaces as they come up from the water and send even more blinding shiny-ness across to the shore. The Boy looks down to protect his eyes and finds writing in the sand at his feet. 'Miyavi Rocks!' is what it says. This is one of Pixi's places. He knows it the way you know things in dreams. And also because no one else he knows is idiot enough to defile such an idyllic landscape with pure, unadulterated idiocy.

The Boy rubs out the writing with his foot, and decides to go fishing. Just coz he can. And just coz he might as well. But try as he might, he catches nothing. Not a fish, not a bottle, not even an ugly tangle of seaweed. Then a man comes to his side. An old man with a posture so straight and a beard so white and a smile in his eyes. He is dressed in a pristine suite, like those old Istanbul gentlemen.

The Old Man sits on the shore near the Boy and neither of them speak. Then something tugs at the Boy's rod. He reels it in; a big, fat tuna. And laying it on the sand next to him, he casts his bait again. Instantly another tug. And another right after that. The Boy reels in 5 fish within 20 dream-minutes, and then he turns to the Old Man.

"Uncle, who are you?" he asks. "Ever since you showed up I've been catching one fish after another."

The Old Man smiles. With fatherly concern he says, "How are you son?" and as if it were pouncing on the opportunity to be mentioned a sharp pain stabs the Boy's temple from a far away place. He wants to say he's ok but he can't because something is terribly wrong somewhere even though he can't remember it.

"There's a name, uncle, clawing at my mind. I want to say it, so it goes away but it makes no sense and maybe I'll sound stupid if I do." The Old Man looks at him expectantly. "My head feels like it's gonna crack open," the Boy presses his temples. "How is this relevant to anything?" The man looks at him still and smiles patiently "It is a name in the ancient Tongue of my people. I know only few words in that tongue and have been instructed to use less of them still. Yet this isn't one I’ve ever learned." the Boy looks up at the Old Man for an answer, still absurdly clueless. "Perhaps I shouldn't be ignoring it?" he offers, tentatively.

"Son," the Old Man sighs "You're a little dense aren't you?"

"Eh?" 'eh's the Boy, and in another dreamscape, which is as frightening and dark as the white-sanded beach is bright, Pixi hears a familiar 'eh?'

"Hellooooo?!" she cries back to it, but her cry is lost in space. Her voice echoes back at her with a gust of hostile wind. This place is like the charred remains of a land that might once have been beautiful. It is desolate and devastated and on its blackened horizon, which belches black smoke and volcanic ash from seething pot-holes, is a girl with sword at her thigh and wild, billowing hair. She looks at Pixi. Eyes large and bottomless in a way that is all too familiar. And Pixi knows she must get out of there.

The Boy returns first.

He returns on a gentle shove of encouragement that he knows emanates from the Old Man. He returns with an urgency and a wisdom which inhabits him like a holy spirit. He returns to Qiraan leering a bloody leer with his hand still buried deep in the Boy’s chest. Qiraan says something to the effect of this being goodbye, but the words are senseless to him. He just barely raises his head, on a neck which had gone limp only moments ago, and looks at Qiraan. It is like a curtain has been lifted away. His mind is unclouded. His senses aware. The fibres of his being are vibrating at an intensity they have never before vibrated at. The life has near left his body, and yet he feels like he could dodge bullets if this was the Matrix.

“Brother of my mother,” he says to Qiraan with a voice calm and Zen. “I’m sorry. But we have come too far, you and I.”

And then the Boy speaks the name. Qiraan’s name. And everything ends in the eye of a blinding, nuclear storm.

***

"Helloooo!" La-lu yells, waving her arms about as she runs towards two figures that are on the verge of disappearing off the edge of a giant dune hill. The wind must finally have carried her voice to them, because the figures halt in their tracks and appear to turn in her direction. Seizing the opportunity La-lu makes a dash across a red valley, over to the foot of the dune hill. By the time she reaches it, the figures have climbed down to meet her half way.

They turn out to be two Djinn. One tall and well built, the other older, stouter, more angry looking. La-lu recoils for an instant when she notices their pointy ears and tails. But it goes unnoticed under all that huffy-puffy-wheezy breath catching business. Her experience with Djinn thus far hasn't been wholesome, but before she gets a chance ascertain whether or not these two are with the good-guys or the bad-guys, the tall one speaks.

"Bint Naas, what on earth are you doing here?"

"My. Friends. We. They're." La-lu expels words between gasps and the two Djinn try to connect them together. "In. Trouble!"

"They sure as hell would be if you've come this far," says the stout one.

"Please. Help!" La-lu pleads, her eyes teary so that the tall one feels instantly moved by her plight. He looks at his companion a moment, perhaps to let his intention be known to him, before turning back to La-lu.

"C'mon bint Naas. Show us the way." he takes her hand, and though the gesture feels inappropriately intimate to her, she takes comfort in the fact that it's probably socially acceptable to him. I suppose these guys must naturally be more touchy-feely than us, she thinks and mentally shrugs her shoulders.

"Oi!" the stout one calls out after them. "I'm gonna miss the Hadara!" he seems genuinely peeved.

"Ignore Qum-qam," the tall one smiles at La-lu. "He pretends to be grumpy but he's actually kind. Show me the way please."

"Ok," La-lu starts walking.

"Wait, where are we going?"

"I'll guide you."

"No, point it out."

"Oh," La-lu looks confused. "There. I came over those slopes." she points her right finger with one eye squinty.

"Ok, my name is Jaa-Qin," Jaa-Qin, wraps his arm around La-lu's waist in a manner no amount of cultural touchy-feeliness can justify in her mind. "Now hold on tight."

Next thing La-lu knows, the two are airborne, but not high or long enough to be flying. Only fast enough to not have their feet touch the ground. It’s as if a strong gust of wind is transporting them in a single huff. They reach the ravine (or what's left of it) in three blinks of the eye. La-lu steps out of Jaa-Qin’s embrace the moment they touch down. She picks through the rubble to Pixi's side to check that her friend is still breathing, albeit faintly.

“She’s still alive!” La-lu declares, but Jaa-Qin, and Qum-Qam barely hear her over the flabbergastation they are experiencing at the sight of the scene they've just happened upon. The former forgets about his fond curiosity for La-lu, the latter forgets to be grumpy at the prospect of missing his Hadara.

"What in God's name happened here?" Qum-Qam gapes slack-jawed as Jaa-Qin treads through the devastation to where the Boy's remains have re-assumed their human form.

"Shit," he says and turns his face away out of horror and sheer remorse. "It's him."

"What's that?" Qum-Qam makes his way over.

"It's Ezeqiel's son."

"You're shitting me?"

"No, I'm not. Al-aqazaam will be-"

"No I mean..." Qum-Qam is undergoing his second bout of flabberghastation over a discovery he's just made. "This mess...it’s Qiraan..."

"What?" Jaa-Qin, who has been crouching over the Boy's naked body, looks up at his companion.

"This signet ring...this...this," holding up a ring he's just picked up he indicates the oily, smoking blackness that is smeared all over the ground and surrounding rocks like a giant head has had its brains blown out and splattered everywhere, "It's Qiraan!"

"Yeah that was his name," La-lu exclaims. "He wanted Pixi. He was gonna kill us all, but the Boy stopped him." Jaa-Qin turns back to the body at his feet and runs his hand over its blood caked forehead and hair.

"What have you done, my Prince?" he whispers, and then removing his cloak, wraps the Boy in it and takes him in his arms. "Qum-Qam, take that girl," he calls out over his shoulder. "We need to get these two back, perchance they can be saved."

***

'This world is full of wonder, Pixi. Come back to it.'

When Pixi comes to, three days have lapsed. A late afternoon sunlight filters through a small rose window, and onto the foot of her bed. There's another bed across from hers on which La-lu is nodding off in intervals, a book in her lap. Pixi remembers her friend’s voice, which had been speaking to her relentlessly throughout her sleep. She pulls herself up with some effort and leans against the head board. Her eyes scan the unfamiliar room for something to drink. Her throat is parched.

"La-lu," she emits a rasp, and though it's barely as loud as the rustle of bedcovers La-lu hears it and jumps off the bed, her book toppling to the ground.

"Pixi! Oh my days, you're back!" she stumbles over to Pixi’s side on numb legs. "How are you feeling?"

"Can I have some water?"

"Yeah sure," La-lu goes over to a pedestal near the door where a jug and glass are sitting on a silver tray, as purposeful and prim as Alice's 'eat me'-'drink me' stuff. The whole room looks affected. As if a bunch of human things were deliberately put together to make the furnishing seem as natural as possible, though they look anything but. Another thing that’s strange is the smell of this place. It’s like no place Pixi has smelled at all. And like how familiar smells inject us with a powerful bout of nostalgia from time to time, the sheer lack of familiarity here makes Pixi a tad unnerved. La-lu felt the same when she first arrived here three days ago, but she’s grown used to it now.

"Where is he?" Pixi asks, after gulping down her first glassful. She holds out the crystal tumbler for a refill.

"I was told he's in intensive care."

"Where?" Pixi looks about her again, "Where are we?"

"We're on the other side, Pixi. We made it," La-lu smiles. "This is the kingdom of Al-Aqazaam. He’s the Boy’s uncle."

Before Pixi can react to this news,her thought sequence is interrupted.

"I see the crazy Turkish one has revived," says a voice that is once again strange to Pixi but not to La-lu. The two turn to the door-end of the room where Jaa-Qin is leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest. La-lu's blush at the sight of him goes unnoticed.

"He he, crazy Turkish one," this from a female Djinn that comes to fill up the doorway next to him. The two chuckle amongst themselves as if there's something especially funny about Pixi's Turkishness.

"Peace be upon you, crazy Turkish one. My name is Jaa-Qin."

“Mihrimah,” the female nods her head in greeting.

"And I am Pixi," Pixi says a little uncomfortably.

"Yeah, we know," beams Mihrimah, still looking terribly amused. It makes Pixi feel like the time she got recognised as a Turkish at Banda Ache airport, and singled out from among the 30 odd people coming out of the arrivals gate, by random bystanders who yelled 'Merhaba!' 'Turkiye!' and 'Istanbul!' at her. It ensured that she was the butt of many a good joke throughout the Indonesia trip.

"What's the big idea telling everyone I'm Turkish?" she turns to La-lu.

"She didn't need to tell us, we know your kind too well!" Mihrimah waves, as she comes to stand above the bed. Bending over her she surprises Pixi by sticking her lips against her forehead. Apparently, this is how they check ones temperature on this side.

"Eh?!" Pixi says, both at her remark and at the sudden trespass on her personal space.

"Sure, you lot have been up to all manner of crazy shiKt since the beginning of time," Jaa-Qin offers. And then a voice calls out from the corridor beyond the door. ‘Say what? How's that?’ –it says.

"Ata-Qan. It's the crazy Turkish one. She's up!" Jaa-Qin yells over his shoulder. Quick, excited footsteps approach Pixi's room, and their owner sticks his head through the door.

"Let me see....Ooooh! Hello crazy Turkish one!" this one is a short redhead, with a nose stud. He looks like he could be Jaa-Qin's distant relation but lacks the handsome confidence.

"Errr-ello," Pixi is dumbfounded and a little overwhelmed.

"What crazy pooh did the Turks get up to then?" La-lu appears fascinated, more so by Jaa-Qin than the antics of the Turks.

"Like Mehmet the Conqueror, who got his armies to drag ships along the shores of the Bosporus. He was as crazy as they come. And Piri Reis, also mad, but brilliant. Wait, who was that serious nutter, Ata-Qan?" Ja-Qin turns to the red-head. "That Han of the Sky-Turks?"

"Ah! You mean the one they called Bilge Kagan?"

"That's the one!" he slaps Ata-Qan's shoulder enthusiastically. "Classic crazy he was! Back in the mid 700s when every sensible person stayed at home, this one goes exploring the world to conquer unknown lands."

"It's in his blood, what can he do?" Ata-Qan offers.

"Somewhere along his travels, the guy crosses over and comes as far as our doorstep. Back then Al-Aqazaam was a slip of a teenager, just having inherited a kingdom from his late father...may God rest his soul. And do you know what happens?"

Pixi and La-lu shake their heads 'no' while the others listen with anticipating grins as they wait for the punch-line they know all too well. "Bilge-Kagan figures something is amiss here and asks, 'tell me spirit, are you Bilge-kagan's match. Are you and your people of man or demon?' and Al-Aqazaam goes, 'Errrr, we're demon dude.' so Bilge-Kagan says, 'I believe thee, live.' and he turns back with his armies and goes home." Mihrimah and Ata-Qan bawl with laughter, and Pixi feels a little amused bit mostly weak.

"Hey, trust the prince," Ata-Qan cocks his chin in Pixi's direction "to bring back a crazy Turkish!"

"You mean, trust a crazy Turkish to get involved with him," Mihrimah puts her hand on Pixi's shoulder and giggles away. La-lu gives Pixi a each other a 'what tha?!' look, both sharing in the thought that it's ridiculous how child-like and jovial these people are.

"Ahem," the giggling is disrupted by a feigned throat clearing. Startled by the presence behind him, Ata-Qan stumbles a tad into Pixi's room and then spins round to come face to face with the throat clearer. He is a tall and skinny older Djinn with two very symmetrical curtains of Ghd straight hair, parted equally along either side of his face. "Ahem," he emphasises when everyone turns to him. No polite introductions from this guy. "I doubt Al-Aqazaam will be pleased that you are over familiarising with the Bint Naas."

"And what are you gonna do, tell on us?" Ata-Qan betrays his age-range and gets shirty like a juvenile.

"Al-Aqazaam has more pressing matters on his hands presently," Jaa-Qin quips back. “And I really don’t think he’d mind.”

"That so? And I suppose the Turkish one also doesn’t mind that her privacy is being invaded while she’s scarcely covered...” returns Ghd. You can tell there is a bit of a power struggle between these two.

“She doesn’t mind, do you Turkish?” Ata-Qan asks Pixi.

“Ummm....actually I only just realised my state of undress,” finding that she’s in a spaghetti strap slip, Pixi pulls up the bed covers over her bare shoulders. “Could I request a scarf?”

“Ooops, sorry,” Jaa-Qin says apologetically. He and Ata-Qan simultaneously look away.

“If it’s any consolation you aren’t exactly a sight for sore eyes at the moment,” Ata-Qan smiles idiotly, and fails to realise his offense even when Mihrimah slaps his arm and begins pushing him out the door. “What? What did I say?”

“Eh?” Pixi turns to La-lu, but La-lu avoids her gaze, welcoming instead the distraction from Jaa-Qin as he makes his exit.

“Hey La-lu,” he half whispers. “I’ll meet you in the courtyard after Maghreb.” This is followed by a wink. Exeunt four Djinn, with the door shutting behind them. Pixi turns to La-lu again.

“Oi,” she shakes her arm to draw her friend’s attention, which is still fixed on the space Jaa-Qin occupied only a moment ago. “I want a mirror?”

“You what?”

“A mirror. I want to see what happened to me.”

“Nothing happened to you, Pixi.”

“Then what did the red-head mean?”

“You’re just a bit bruised up.”

Refusing to give up on her demand for a mirror, Pixi gets herself out of bed when La-lu fails to comply. She wobbles over to the one hanging above a washbowl across the room and discovers, to no one’s surprise, that La-lu’s remark was a gross understatement. Pixi has deep purple bruises under her eyes, a cut on her upper lip and her right eyebrow has split. Two stitches stick out of it where the gash got sown up. To top it off, she has a bruise circling her throat where Kiraan held her.

“Oh Pixi,” La-lu sadly puts her arm around her friend and tries to lead her back to bed.

“Hey, cool man. I rather fancy myself like this,” Pixi tries to smile at her image to make light of it. But she doesn’t feel light. She feels like a person who got beat up in her sleep, and her head feels like it’s stuffed with gauze. But these discomforts are far outweighed by her anxiety about the Boy. All she can think of right now is wanting to see him and know that he’s alright. “What’s the name of that tall one you keep ogling?” Pixi makes her way to the door.

“I wasn’t ogling him!” La-lu looks mortified.

“Ok, it went two ways. Tell me his name!”

“Jaa-Qin,” La-lu looks defeated as Pixi opens the door to yell after Jaa-Qin. “Oi, what are you doing?” she dashes to her side and pulls her back into the room.

“I need to ask him about the Boy.”

“Yeah but you can’t go yelling about the place. We’re in a castle. It has a king. And courtiers. Everyone’s posh!”

“They weren’t acting posh.” Pixi gets yanked backwards and La-lu slams the door shut.

“And any way, you’re in a slip. Let’s get you something to wear first.”

Author's Note

2010-11-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made' --Immanuel Kant

Pixi and the Boy that Never Was has gone on hiatus.
To all you lovely readers who took the time to follow, comment and encourage this piece of work, whether publically of privately, thank you. I’m afraid the winter blues have set in with a serious case of disillusionment, and a shivering Pixi has begun to fade into obscurity.
(The crushing obscurity of adult responsibilities and PhD deadlines and lack of readers.)

It is now up to you to keep the story-time fire in the hearth of our imagination burning. Spread the word, FOLLOW if you aren’t already, and drop me a line on whether you think the world needs Pixi. Or in the word’s of Peter Pan: If you Believe, clap for Tinker-bell.

In Which There is the Beggining of the End

2010-11-10T02:52:00.000-08:00

On some bleak winter night, in late December of the year of the shiKt, Pixi hears the Tambourine Man playing. Goodbye year of the shiKt, she thinks, as she leans over 夢幻's shoulder to turn up the volume on Xeph’s iPod. Here's to being younger, braver, stranger for a night. What follows is like dumbing, nerd magic.

“You guys have been having this conversation for much too long!" Pixi exclaims, as she waits for the next player to take his/her turn. The conversation in question is a brief exchange between Xeph and Yoko about opening the window to let in some fresh air or leaving it closed to keep in the warmth.

"You have to play me now," 夢幻 grabs Xeph’s controller and hands Pixi the other one. "I’m not going to go easy on you." And that’s when Pixi notices it, like some absurd epiphany.

"You got weird eyes, man!" she is returning the compliment he paid her months ago, but not deliberately. "Are you wearing lenses?"

"No, this is my natural colour."

"They're light brown! What kinda Japanese guy has light brown eyes?"

"Yeah, it's only me in my family,"

"Hen na nihonjin," Pixi says and then a peal of giggles descends on both of them. In real time it lasts about a minute but in Pixi's mind she's been splitting her sides for eternity.

And then they eat for eternity.
And watch anime for eternity.
And Pixi spends another eternity kicking Duke's ass in Street Fighter...but only coz she’s playing Blanka, and he got that porcupine electric shock wave that only works on the defence.
In that order. Probably.

Later, as they slip and trip their way to the 29 bus stop via some longwinded back-street route that 夢幻 is convinced he knows, the hush of the snow-covered streets is disturbed by more giggling and then a clumsy snow fight that ends abruptly when Pixi gets distracted by the joy of drawing smilies on car hoods.

"In Malaysia they got this desert called ice-kachang," she tells him, scooping a fist-full of snow into her mouth. "It's like ice-shavings covered in bits of fruit and syrup."

"Ah yeah, in Japan also, we have this," he says, taking a mouthful himself.

"Oooh, let's lie in the snow!" Pixi dashes for an amply blanketed spot which happens to be the centre of the street, and drops to the ground, spreading her arms out on either side of her.

"Good idea," 夢幻 follows suit, but then realises there isn't much to look at. The sky is a slab of slate stained pink by sodium lights. And obstructing their view of this terrific void is a web of tree branches.

Sell me some sweet-high at the cost of all the memories we're making tonight. Slow me down, make me stupid -this is the only way I know how to silence all the insecure voices in my head, this is where I want to be lost, in the tricks of my mind, going round and round an incident, every incident, like Dejavu on a broken record.
I'm losing time. Moments are snatching themselves out of my life and every other turn of this conversation is static.

Gomen. The words you said, while we lay in the snow, they escaped me. Leaving behind only a cold-sweat animal fear which proved only that insecurities penetrate even to this level of my consciousness.

“I’m hurting my family,” Pixi says, randomly. “And I hate myself for it.”

“Me too. My family, they wake up at 4am in the morning to go fishing. Work all day. And I’m here doing nothing,” picking up where Pixi’s guilt left off, 夢幻 vents about the life choices that weigh heavy on his own conscience. Two years ago he lied to his parents about landing a job in Tokyo, and flew out to London instead, without a job in sight and barely able to speak the language. He wanted to be an Artiste, not a fisherman.

Now a hopeless writer and a hopeful artist stare stupidly skywards, a pair of pathetic excuses for snow-angels.

“Nonetheless, I think you are my current, personal hero,” Pixi declares.

“Hah! That’s your problem, your eyes are broken.”

“Shine! Aho!” Pixi tells him to die and then follows it up with a Kansai-ben dialect ‘idiot.’ This get’s 夢幻 giggling again over the joys of having taught a Turkish girl the worst kind of Japanese she could possibly be speaking.

“Shame we can’t see the stars,” Pixi says after some silence, and with a stab of rememberance’s bitter-sweet visit, her mind changes course during its next time-skip, and rides out, full gear, on a length of static.

Rewind.

***

The static delivers her to the threshold of the beginning of the end. When the sun rises on the day after the night before, it illuminates a dreamscape. This world, this time is a stranger to us. Life, something we never volunteered to take part in. Damn I knew I should have taken that red pill instead. The road ahead stretches out without bends or turns. No milestones or landmarks dot the horizon. We're just walking, with nothing to justify the act, like someone stuck on a treadmill. A hamster in a ball. And when the sun will set again on that same day, its dying rays will turn sepia the remains of our lives, barely clinging to a breath.

Pixi never does remember how that day started. Her memories only extend as far as the moment things began to go wrong...and even that, just scarcely. It was when she, La-lu and the Djinn Boy rode into a ravine that was like an open wound on the earth’s surface, and the sky was no longer visible from the sheer height of the cliffs that hemmed them in. It was like they were on mars or some Star Trek set. The light which penetrated from somewhere above made the wind-eroded stones glow red and orange. When the breath of the desert heaved a sigh, it shoved past them as would a rude commuter on the Monday morning underground. It made the horses nervous and Pixi wondered about the truth of those stories about the Simoom, and all those poison desert winds that could sear the flesh off a man in an instant.

They'd skipped breakfast again. Filled up their empty bottles and set off early. The lack of sustenance began to take its toll on Pixi's strength. She worried about this but hid it from the others, convincing herself that the next meal they got, lizard or no lizard, she'd shut her eyes if she had to and eat it. At some point someone volunteered a good idea about a prayer break in an hour or so, but the time for Dhur hadn't even come in yet, before the gorge trembled something horrible. Since that tremble all that the three could think about was getting out of the ravine. They rode on as fast as they could, Little knowing that their pursuers had been on their tail since the night before, so that even when the Boy had gone for a long walk while Pixi and La-lu bathed in the hot spring, they’d still had an audience. And now, their horses gallop onward like the wind in their mains, but in vain.

It begins with a voice, as it often does. A familiar voice.

"Well, if it isn't my little nephew and his girlfriend!" the familiar voice resonates all around like it's peeling off the very rocks that tower over them. Instantly Pixi's horse rises onto its hind legs, threatening to throw Pixi and La-lu off. The Djinn-Boy's has also began backing away with angry snorts and whinnies. Pixi and La-lu look about them desperately, trying to trace the source of the voice.

"You always did have a weakness for dramatic entrances," the Boy mumbles under his breath, as he eyes the limestone walls with a distasteful knowing. "I should have known that land shudder was you," he calls out then in no particular direction. His voice echoes back at him and then is promptly followed by a response.

"Indeed you should have," the response resonates back. "What are you, stupid?"

"Asshole," the Boy mumbles more to himself, but he gets a comeback nonetheless.

"Bastard," it says like an immature juvenile, "And what's this," the voice instantly turns perky again, and with it, Qiraan steps out from a limestone wall like a man walking through a door, languid and slinking. "Pixi's rotund beasty has been replaced by another marginal character!" As he says this, far far away in Pixi's London flat, Sufi-cat's little round ears turn backwards and her eyes go squinty with annoyance. Neither Mum nor Little-Sis know why.

"Mum, look at Sufi-cat's face!" Little-sis chuckles. "She looks like someone's been backbiting about her!" and while the two laugh, Sufi-cat sprints across the living room, with her undercarriage of fat bouncing about as she goes. This is how Sufi-cat stomps off. Fatly.

Back in Jordan's Wadi Rum...or Wherever they are, for my guess is as good as anyone's, Qiraan strikes a camp pose. "Greetings young lady," he says to La-lu with a wink. His minions, who have also been stepping out of rocks one by one, swiftly close in on the three.
The Djinn-Boy dismounts just as a huge ogre of a Djinn grabs the reins of his anxious horse. He pushes past him as if the guy wasn't big enough to kick his weedy ass into oblivion.

"What the he'll are you doing here?" the Boy makes his way towards Qiraan with a reckless spring in his step, like he's about to plummet him. The dismounting La-lu and Pixi are terribly impressed by his courage, but more so are they worried for his safety.

"What do you mean what am I doing here?" Qiraan's minions step in front of the Boy to detain him. "You three are like squatting ducks... You know how ducks squat idiotly, and kind of quack at each other every so often in that inane fashion. That's what you're like...in this desert... all by yourselves."

Silence descends. A confused everyone looks at Qiraan with a look that would say ‘Eh?’ a bit sardonically if it could speak. "And any way," he recovers from where his words ran out of relevance. "I'm the main villain in this little fairy tale. You think I'd let an opportunity like this pass?" He steps up onto a bolder as if he were about to conduct an orchestra and spreads out his arms.

"Is that the uncle you fancied?" a wide-eyed La-lu whispers to Pixi as the two are pushed on by a pair of good-for-nothing yakuza types, while another leads away their horse.

"I didn't fancy him!" Pixi whispers back angrily.

"Qiraan, if you want a final showdown, come here and fight your own battles!" the Djinn-Boy demands, pushing the minions out of his way.

"No don't!" Pixi makes like she's gonna break into a run to stop the Boy, but she gets held back by the be-tattooed Djinn dude behind her. "Please don't!" she pleads to the Boy.

"I'll be fine," he throws Pixi a smile and wink that could stop hearts if the moment weren’t so inappropriate.

"Will you now?" with a cock of his head, Qiraan indicates for his minions to step away from the Boy, which they do. And then he considers his nephew as if fondly. "You speak like you haven't still got my venom flowing through your veins." With that, the Boy suddenly doubles over and begins to gag though nothing comes out of his mouth. Inclining his head sideways, Qiraan smiles something vile. "Enough pressure? C’mon, you can handle more," he chuckles and on his hands and knees the Boy screams with pain.

"Qiraan stop!" Pixi yells, struggling against the Be-tattooed Djinn dude. "Please! Stop, please!" Qiraan gestures with his hand and the guy lets her go. Pixi scampers to the Boy's side. His face has turned pale and beads of sweat are dripping from his temples. He can't even open his eyes. Pixi looks up at Qiraan with the most murderous intent Pixily possible to communicate with an expression. "Why are you such a bastard? What do you want from him?!"

"First of all he's the bastard. I'm just acting like one." Qiraan smiles and then looks disappointed that he didn't get any laughs at his witty remark. "Come now, he knew the consequences of his actions. He ought to have been taken back and tried for his desertion. But oh, Big-brother can be so very busy...and there's far too much bureaucracy in this world. I decided to finish things off the old fashioned way and do everyone a favour. I’m rather efficient like that."

"You've just got some old grudge you can't get over, you hateful man!" Pixi snaps.

"Ah ah ah, don't talk to me like your boyfriend's life isn't squirming in my grasp, my sweet. I still have a score to settle with you too." in a foetal position by Pixi's side, the Boy moans and starts to tremble like his strength to bear the pain is going to give way any second.

"Fine, settle it then, just leave him alone!" Pixi yells, desperation making her voice break. Qiraan's lips languidly fold into an arrogant, lopsided grin.

"You're lucky I like you, Pixi. Otherwise after that humiliation you dealt me and my boy's last time..." he pauses, as if keeping his rising anger in check. "In any case, that little trick you pulled has made you just that much more interesting." He winks flirtatiously.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning?"

"Meaning get to the point! God you really love hearing the sound of your own voice!"

"My offer still stands," he says severely, suddenly having turned very serious. And the look in his eyes awakens a sickening fear in the pit if Pixi's gut. She hesitates, but then her Boy utters another cry.

"Fine," She agrees, and without giving herself a chance to change her mind, is just getting to her feet when an icy and trembling hand grabs her wrist. The Boy can't lift his head or say anything, but his hand clings to her like it was clinging for dear life. "It's going to be ok," Pixi whispers into his hair as she peels his fingers off her arm. Then on unsteady legs, she walks up to the bolder on which his uncle is standing.

"Pixi," La-lu finally musters the nerve to speak. "I don't know what's gonna happen but don't!" Pixi turns to smile at her friend and then turns back to Kiraan. Her head reaches his navel, making it necessary for her to look up at him. And He smirks down at Pixi like a spoilt kid that got his play-thing.

"You won't pull anything smart this time, will you?" Kiraan crouches down so that he's face to face with Pixi. "Coz you know what I'll do to him if you try..." he says almost sweetly. And Pixi nods, the fear in her rising like the water level in a sea-side cave when the tide comes in. Behind her, the Boy's moaning has gotten more desperate. Or maybe he's trying to say something to her.

"Please just stop the pain now," Pixi begs Qiraan.

"I promise, it'll be over in a minute," Qiraan purrs, stroking Pixi's face. "Ssssh, shut your eyes," he gently guides down her lids with his fingers. And then Bringing his lips to her ear, and with his eye on his nephew, who's just managed to raise his head to look up at them, whispers "This will hurt a bit."

The next thing Pixi feels is a terrific jolt of pain bolt up her spine. Her vision becomes glazed over and her hearing is dimmed. At first the sensation is like being under water, and then she feels she's lost a vital connection with her body, like a pilot that’s left the cockpit, with the craft in auto-flight. In actual fact, the essence that is Pixi is trapped in her own cadaver, and on the outside La-lu and the Boy watch Qiraan hold her up by her neck, his eyes shut as though listening to fine music.

All the while, Pixi's body contorts in ways that aren't humanly impossible. She starts frothing at the mouth, her arms and legs twisting back on themselves with ugly bone-breaking sounds. La-lu screams and covers her eyes. The Boy, barely rises to his knees and lets forth a blood curdling cry, not of pain, but of something between rage and despair. The Pixi that is lost somewhere hears it, and the doll-like remains in Qiraan's grasp sheds strange and silent tears.

It's the sight of them which causes instinct to rears its head. Like the mad-ass strength that possesses desperate men, and the vicious courage that possesses mothers, with something akin to our animal instinct to survive or protect, the Boy transforms. It comes on like a gag reflex, and a shudder as his skeleton begins to mutate painfully. This is a thing which he once promised himself he’d never resort to. And yet, with a great, bellowing wail he tears out of his flesh to change into that form he inherited from his mother, which to us humans is fantastic yet also frightfully macabre.

When La-lu sees it, the devastation of what's happening to Pixi, topped with the fear of this 13 foot being that looks half man half lizard-cat, knocks her out cold. The thing that Pixi's Boy becomes, grabs Kiraan by the neck with one effortless swoop, and lifting him off the ground, slams him against a wall, cracking the limestone in the process. A manic chuckle emerges from the recesses of Qiraan's suffocating throat and gradually turns into a hearty laugh.

"Owwww! That hurt!" he giggles and then sucks air through his teeth. "Oh, you are royally screwed now."

"Yeah?" And indeed he is, but all that the Boy can think about is distracting Qiraan from Pixi in the hopes that she might regain herself if it's not too late already. But Pixi lies in a heap on the ground where Qiraan dropped her, without a glimmer of life. And the sight boils the blood in the Boy’s veins. His cat-like eyes glare at his uncle with venom that conceals any trace of resemblance to himself that might still linger about this form. "Show me," he challenges, with a growl of a voice.

"Oh but...wish you'd given me prior notice that we'd be playing monster-man." he laughs again, and then begins to grow in size. "I could have dressed for the occasion!" Qiraan's words become distorted and slow as his voice deepens with his own transformation. The Djinn-Boy loses his grip on him then, and stumbles backwards. In his monster form, Qiraan stands at nearly double the Boy's size, and he has a frightful tail and horns to boot. Regaining his balance the Boy pounces in for another attack, but this time the two move as one, and in a single, swift lunge at each other. Qiraan knocks against the ravine wall again, causing an avalanche of stones that come crashing down around them.

When the rock face does enough crumbling, and can crumble and topple no more, a suspenseful stillness descends on the scene in which the only sound is that of their monstrous heavy breathing. The Boy coughs blood, and then realises that Qiraan's talons are buried deep in his chest, just as his own hand is buried into Qiraan's. His aim, it appears, was a bit off, and his own wound has begun a process of internal bleeding that is rising up his wind-pipe. He looks up to find his uncle smiling at him, apparently unmoved by the severity of his own damages.

"Give her back," the Boy grits his bloody fangs.

"You demand it as if your heart wasn't beating its last in the palm of my paw," Kiraan spits blood nonchalantly, like it was chewed tobacco.

“Give her back to me, damn you!” The Boy wails. Digging his hand deeper into Qiraan’s innards.

"What pride still endures!" Qiraan’s chuckle comes out with a froth of blood and spit. "Your mother's son through and through!" He wipes his mouth with his free hand, and then wraps it around his nephew’s neck. “I wonder if I will regret extinguishing the last trace of her essence that clung to this world...” And the Boy has no comeback, nor any strength to feel angry as he would at the frivolous mention of his mother. He knows he has lost...and that he’s dying. “Guess there’s only one way to find out,” Qiraan says and the Boy steals a final glance at Pixi's body. 'God, I made a promise to you once, that I'd never lay a finger on her,' pleads with the desperate inner voice in his mind, which doesn’t know when to give up. '...And I know that in these last couple of days I've come pretty damn close to breaking that promise.'

As Qiraan begins to tighten his grip on his heart the Djinn-Boy throws his head back in pain and howls. '...but I promise you, I'll walk out of her life for good. She'll never hear from me, I swear...’ the voice keeps going.

"Can you feel this?" Qiraan purrs. "This is the part it gets really excruciating!" And it does. And no more sounds immerge from him, because his lungs are filling with his own blood. 'I know I'm not one of your favourites. You have no obligation to hear me now, when I've put this off far too long...'

And slowly the Boy’s eyes begin to glaze over, and he can no longer hear what Qiraan is saying, as he talks incessantly like the thing that won’t ever shutup.

'But there's someone that's been watching over her...someone who you care for a great deal.’
And then there is just the afternoon rays, seeping in from the top of the ravine like heavenly limelight. And the Boy shuts his eyes to it the way you would to let the summer sun warm your eyelids.

‘Please. I don't know him. But this is the only card I got to play now. For his sake. Save my Pixi.'

In Which Pixi Loses Her Friends and There are Eighteenthousand Dimensions

2010-11-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

Pixi dreams of Sakarya, and a house on a hilltop by the ancient Bridge of Justinianus, under which the Sakarya river once flowed. The house has a çeşme near its gate, for weary travellers to quench their thirst. Its garden is full of roses and tulips. A peacock and its mates, strut about amongst some fowl in the giant bird-enclosure. When the peacocks call, it sounds like the combination of a cat and a baby's cry. And you remember when you hear it that nothing in this world was made without flaws.

There are two narrow paths that run across the central flowerbed to form a ‘V’ shape. Pixi takes the path on the right to the entrance. There she removes her sandals and takes a small flight of steps up to the elevator. The elevator is one of those dingy, old fashioned ones, only big enough for two, barely three people to snuggly-fit. Its light goes off when you're not moving, so when it reaches its destination, everything goes dark for Pixi. In order to get the light to come back on she must push another button or open the door. But the door on the topmost floor doesn't open from the inside. Pixi must wait to be let out. So she waits in darkness, while a voice from outside assures her in Turkish that it's coming.

Then she's in a room, sitting on the floor with her legs folded under her. If this were a samurai flick she’d be the loyal student before her master. But Pixi's posture sucks. And try as she might, she doesn't ooze that refined grace of so many anime samurais, nor even the uncouth dignity of Toshiro Mifune. She's simply Pixi, with her neck bent as if before her kind executioner, and she has far too much to regret. In dreams, she hasn't been to this place for too long a time, and in real life, she's missed her chance for good.

“There’s another man next to this one. The form errs, but the spirit is from God. My eyes sleep, but my heart does not. I sleep but the one by my side does not.”

“Efendim, I remembered now a stanza from Yunus Emre,” the scribe offers. “It goes: Süleyman kuş dilin bilir dediler, Süleyman var Süleyman'dan içeri.”

Pixi on her knees isn’t enough to understand what’s being spoken, but her mind works away at translating the poetry which has just been recited: ‘They said Solomon knew the tongue of birds, within, there is Solomon more than Solomon.’ Eh? -she thinks. Must stow that one away to mull over later.

“This is what it is!” He says with excitement she’s seldom heard in his voice before. And then he recites in clear Arabic another hadith, which goes into one of Pixi’s ears and out the other.

“Efendim, shall we write this hadith too?” the scribe asks.

“Write it, Efendim, write it. I cannot read it but you can,” is the response. Pixi gets distracted then when she remembers that her Spiritual Guide is un-letterred, and then gets to wondering how he learned to recite such hadiths if he couldn’t read them in the first place. It gets her into a mental pickle which isn’t a good place to be when your Spiritual Guide’s attention has just turned to you.

Ill prepared, she bows her head a tad and says, "What will I do...now that you're gone." But in saying, she barely says. A giant lump of remorse hindering the words on their way out of her wind pipe.

“Your everything has been prepared already,” her Shaikh smiles. “You will want for nothing.” He rests his hand on her head the way he did when Pixi was much younger and knew half of what she does now about heartache and betrayal and fatigue. And she savours the weight, as if trying to grasp the wisp of a memory before it disappears.

Pixi comes to with a falling sensation when she loses the back she was leaning against in sleep. Her dream had been so vivid that this parched void of desert as far as the eye can see, looks absurdly surreal. 'what the hell?' is her immediate thought, a though which is mistaken in it's thinking that this is yet another dream. While that cognitive-process is taking its doomed course, she speaks, "What's going on?"

"Something’s happened," is the strained response.

"Of course it bloody well has," Pixi mumbles with eyes bleary. "Something aaaalways happens."

"Did you see what did it? Did you see what it was?” La-lu’s voice is delirious. It hits Pixi like cold water in the face, and sobers her inebriated mind.

“Not really,” there is a hint of something hidden in the Djinn-Boy’s voice. Even a Pixi as stupified she is right now can still read him like a fake palmist would an idiot’s palm.

“I blinked and the next thing I know, the sun’s setting. It been at least a few good hours!” La-lu is beside herself with a shock-full distress. “I didn’t even know it was possible to sleep on horse-back!”

“It’s possible to sleep anywhere at all,” Pixi comes down from her horse and rubbing her eye walks a little tipsily up to La-lu and the Boy. “Where’s the others?” she looks about her still oblivious to what’s happened.

“They’re gone, Pixi.” La-lu’s face looks like it did that one time when she sneaked a toke off Pixi’s fag, and got caught in the act by one of the most Big-Sisterly of their friends back home.

Pixi gives La-lu an 'eh?'-look before she says, ‘where?’ but La-lu has no answer and Pixi finally grasps the meaning of her 'gone.' she turns to the Djinn-Boy, and the look on his face confirms her suspicions. "You knew this would happen..." she has some accusation in her voice.

"I didn't know. I only surmised it might happen."

"Did you do it?"

"Nooo!" he says defensively. "No. this is way too big for me."

"How did you know then?" asks La-lu.

“I told you, I didn’t know, I surmised!”

“Ok so how did you surmise?”

"I...we...they...aaargh, stop glaring at me like that, I feel intimidated!"

"We're not glaring."

"You are glaring. You are glaring all accusingly."

Pixi and La-lu look at each other and then look back at the Boy with forced smiles. "Better?" La-lu asks.

"Don't be stupid, now you're just grinning like Arnold Schwarzenegger."

"Dammit!" Pixi punches her palm a tad threateningly, "are you gonna tell us how you surmised or no?"

"Lei-lines, portals, paths," the Boy begins with a sigh. "-they seek you out and they find you. But you gotta be seeking first." In his voice is a sorriness like he feels responsible. "Guys, they didn't want to come. I'm sorry. There was nothing I could do."

"Will they be alright?" La-lu wonders sadly.

"Yes," the Boy's nod is full of conviction. "I'm sure they're alright. We just got separated is all. And on the plus side, this is a sign that we're on the right track."

"What, we lose our friends and it's the universes way of telling us, we're getting somewhere?" Pixi says with what seems like irreverent cynicism, but really it’s just her anxiety talking.

"Err, yeah."

"Oh, thanks universe!" Pixi hollers to the void. "Thank you very much!"

"Pisssh!" the Boy slaps his hand over her mouth, "stop blaspheming!"

"Are you sure they're ok?" La-lu asks again.

"I'm absolutely positive," he says and is absolutely right, for while the three are stranded in the middle of nowhere with two horses and half a bottle if water between them, Luw, Glorious and Dee have just woken to find themselves in the company if some peeved Bedouins. An argument ensues with the phrase, 'where is horses?' it resumes with a 'where are we?' and concludes with the three somehow getting invited to watch the Fifa semi finals game between Germany and Spain (which they’d all been secretly hoping not to miss) in a cave overlooking the Al-Khazneh.

"We should be worried about us right now," says the Boy, and he's absolutely right again.

"Also, we missed two prayers already. You guys wanna pray Maghreb together?"

"Yeah but, we got no water to take wuduu," La-lu says.

"We got a lot of this," The Boy bends over to gather a handful of sand, and then let's it stream out if his fist. "It’s all about bonding with the elements, eh?" he winks at Pixi, trying to cheer her up. Both her and La-lu realise then that he's trying to be strong for them. Unbeknownst to each other, they simultaneously make a decision to shoulder some if the effort too.

"I'm desperate for a shower though," Pixi crouches and starts taking off her sandals and rolling her jeans up above her ankles.

"hah!" La-lu points. "silly Pixi, all rolling things up like you’re gonna get wet."

"I'm getting into the mindset in order to feel clean. Never done this with sand before."

After their ritual cleansing, Pixi stands to prayer with thoughts of still feeling a tad grimy but is distracted by the surprise of hearing the Djinn-Boy's recitation for the first time. With La-lu at her side and the Boy in front of them, Pixi is transported. It isn’t one of those show-offy recitations, like how some people have, with all that fake-ass mournfulness. It’s bitter sweet and humble and shy. It sings with the smell of the air and soil of an impossible land. And it sings of a yearning from a parched-breast, which makes Pixi and La-lu feel small but still comforted.

After they finish, the Boy quickly turns and puts his sandals back on while the girls sit reciting a dhikr they keep count of on the back of their finger joints.

"I'm gonna go look for water," he says, still a little self-conscious after leading the prayer. "I think I can feel some around here."

"Ha! Your mind was wandering in prayer!" La-lu points again like the annoying kid at school.

"Was not!"

"Was too!"

"Ok, it entered my thoughts briefly in the third raqah, but I didn't actually check until after we gave Salaam!" with that he stands and begins walking west where the horizon is darkest and speckling with silver freckles.

"What did he mean when he said check? What like psychically?" La-lu turns to Pixi but Pixi is still doe-eyed and awe-fully staring after the Boy. "Oh my God! You so like him! " she exclaims like it’s the revelation of the millennia. “Scandalous!”

"Eh! No!" Pixi snaps to attention. "Whatever."

"You never say 'whatever', Pixi."

"So?"

"So you're really out of character right now, and you were gawking after him with oil-puddle peepers!"

"Shuddup," Pixi deals a fatal elbow into La-lu's side just as the Boy makes his re-appearance. "That was quick," she says to him coolly.

"We're setting camp up yonder, grab the horses," is his response.

Just as the Boy predicted, it so transpires that there is an oasis in a little valley just beyond some limestone hills. The moment Pixi lays eyes on it she dashes for the bubbling little pool in the centre of the oasis, with a mad-ass victory cry, arms flailing on either side. Flat on her belly at its bank, she shoves her face in the water only to pull it back out instantly in sheer horror. It's just then that La-lu also notices a curious smell. "What's that-" she begins but is cut off by Pixi and the Boy simultaneously.

“Aaaaauuuurgh!” goes Pixi.

"Smell?" the Boy smiles at La-lu with a mischievous glint in his eye.

"Like rotten eggs," La-lu says.

"It's sulphuric! And hot!" Pixi yells again, coughing out the water she’s drank. "Eeew, it's a hot spring!"

The silence of the dune desert by night is so absolute that the auditory senses suffer a bout of confusion that translates physically as a pressure in the ears, where there is no reason for one. It’s a spectacular feeling Pixi remembers as she reclines by the fire-side some hours later, thoroughly bathed, watered and all prayed out. She's even attempted to eat alas in vain. Since they are not in the dune desert, however, it’s not quite as quiet here. But there is a special serenity nonetheless. If it weren’t for the obscene eating noises La-lu and the Boy continue to make at her, Pixi’s moment of pensive relaxation and stillness would be complete.

“La-lu, you want the tail?” the Boy offers some of his food to her friend, who takes it gratefully, with a yummy, greasy smile in Pixi’s direction.

“It’s not so bad, you know,” she adds.

“You would say that, coz you’re African and this guy is a most backward creature,” Pixi hisses at him.

“Oh come on,” the Boy licks his fingers. “The Chinese eat shiKt worse than Africans and Djinn put together!”

“What have the Chinese got to do with me, pray tell?”

“Chinese, Japanese, Korean...they’re all the same no?”

“There is a world of difference. And what the hell is your point?”

“Well I always had this feeling you’d end up with a Jap. Something like a huntch. And my huntches are often correct, so you better get used to weird food.” the Boy starts giggling.

“There’s nothing remotely weird about Japanese cuisine, and your hunch is gravely mistaken.”

“We’ll see," he shrugs

“Have you got a huntch about who I’ll end up with?” La-lu looks at the Boy naively, and then meets Pixi’s peeved glare which tells her in so many words to pick a side. “What? I was just curious,” La-lu returns to the remains of her lizard.

“I’m sorry Pixi,” the Boy says. “I was just teasing. There’s no hunch. Here, you want the last piece of my lizard?” he sticks the foul thing under her nose.

“Piss off!” Pixi slaps at his hand. “Of all the desert wildlife we could be eating, you catch us three giant lizards!”

“Yeah? Like what wildlife, mademoiselle?”

“I donno. Hare. Oryx. Gazelle. Some kind of bird.”

“Just consider your pretty self friggin lucky we have water and the horses got some vegetation to mull over,” he says, a little vexed.

“Hey, I was joking,” Pixi touches his arm gently, “Who gets their own personal hot spring, eh? Even if we do have to hold our noses while we drink the water” she smiles at him sweetly, and the smile combined with the touch gets the Boy’s heart doki doki-ing faster. And then there is music. Not the metaphorical ‘why-do-birds-always-sing-when-you’re-around?’ kinda lame-ass music, but real, angry music. It’s Eminem and it’s coming out of Pixi’s iPod combined with Glorious’s mini portable speakers.

“Eh?” Pixi turns to La-lu who’s begun bouncing around the fire. "Where’d you get those?”

“Glorious asked me to keep them in my rucksack! Isn’t this great?” La-lu continues bouncing like a kid.

“Yeah, show us some good moves La-lu!” Pixi giggles. “I’m gonna have to strut my stuff at Big-sis and Kalahili’s wedding coming up. Those Arabs know how to party."

“Why? You can’t dance either?” the Boy asks.

“What you mean, either?” Pixi gets up and puts her hands on her hips in mock anger. “I can sing!”

“Hah! Yeah ok,” the Boy teases.

“Right, I’m gonna subject you to Pixi’s-embarrassing-hippie-boogie now!” she says and commences in dishing out a series of moves that has the Boy and La-lu holding their tummies with laughter for a good five minutes. And then the song changes and briefly, so does Pixi’s dancing, and there is nothing funny or embarrassing about it.

With her eyes closed, Pixi raises her arms and lets the music sweep through her. For an instant, she suspends time in the Boy’s mind, and though the doki doki-ing has grown even louder than before, he can’t hear or feel it. Neither is he aware that his pupils have dilated to gargantuan proportions. It’s Pixi that notices that when she opens her eyes and their gazes meet. And he's got that same look he had earlier in the morning when she was trying to button him up, but it’s amplified now, like a giant, hormone-pumped-tomatoe. Overwhelmed, Pixi stops and clasps her hands together shyly.

“Ok, khalas,” she says abruptly, coming to sit next to him.

“Why’d you stop?”

“Because.”

“That was good.”

“No ‘twasn’t. I got carried away,” Pixi turns the volume down as Thom York launches into High and Dry. “Hate this song,” she says because she actually loves it but it makes her feel suicidal.

“What’s that constellation?” La-lu asks on a whim, coming to sit next to them.

“That one?”

“No, that.” La-lu leans over Pixi to trace the constellation in the Boy’s line of vision.

“Cassiopeia. She’s the vain queen. And that there, right on top of Pegasus is her daughter, Andromeda, chained up. And there’s Perseus. He’s the hero that saves her.”

“The same one that kills Medusa?” Pixi asks.

“Yep.”

“Waaah,” La-lu lies onto her back to appreciate the canvas of Greek mythology unfurling before them. White speckles across the ebony flanks of a giant, celestial stallion. “Do you reckon there was some truth in myths?”

“Of course there was,” Pixi and the Boy say simultaneously, also lying on their backs.

“Man doesn’t create in a bubble,” the Boy concludes. “He’s just incredibly good at blowing things out of proportion.”

“Ok, smart ass,” Pixi interrupts. “How about all the Arabic names for the stars?”

“Just the Arabic ones?" he smiles like a show-off.

"As a start."

"That one," he points, “In Lepus. Can you see it?”

“Where?”

“Right near Orion.”

“Ah, ok.”

“In Arabic that’s Nihal, which means the camels quenching their thirst...because to the Ancient Arabs, Lepus looked like a caravan of camels, and not a hare.” The Boy points somewhere else, “Koo She, Chinese for bow and arrow. And then,” He points again, and Pixi isn’t bothering to follow his finger any more. She’s lying on her side watching his face while La-lu slowly drifts off into sleep. “Ashlesha, in Hindu, is the embracing one.” Distracted by Pixi’s stare the Boy turns his face to her. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Pixi,” La-lu interrupts, as she wakes briefly to pull Pixi’s abaya over herself and turn onto her side. “Tell us a story.”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” Pixi says to La-lu but looks at the Boy. “Yes, tell us a story,” she urges him, snuggling into her hoody against the cooling breeze.

“Which one?”

“An epic one,” mumbles La-lu, half asleep.

“An ancient one,” says Pixi, her eyes twinkling.

“Ok then,” still on his back, the Boy folds his arms under his head. “In the time when there was no man, and no faction between the Djinn, earth was home only to our people, and we were an unruly bunch of good-for-nothings."

“This is a true story, right? Ooooh, I like the sound of it!" Pixi interrupts, excitedly.

“Are you gonna shuddup?”

“Yes. Sorry. Go on.”

“Every couple of hundred years, God’s angels would come down to the earth, to give them all an ass-kicking when their misbehaviour reached intollerable hights. It was after one such battle, when no-man’s-land was laid to ruin and littered with corpses, that a little boy was discovered, weeping amidst the turmoil. The child being parentless, the angels took him under their wings and returned to heaven with him.”

“Did they ask God if they could keep him, like a little puppy-dog?”

“Yeah.”

“And God said yes?”

“Yeah.”

“And then he grew up and became Azazil, right? And he was the great imam of all the angels, and only God knew that he was destined to be Satan. Right?"

“Yeah,” the Boy, having had his tale hijacked by an over-enthusiastic Pixi, begins to drift off himself.

"But I know this story!" Pixi says, still wide, wide awake, even as La-lu has taken to snoring lightly and the Boy has given up on the fight to keep his eye-lids up. In the absence of a response she pokes the Boy in his side but that doesn't rouse him either.

Folding her arms under her head, Pixi contemplates the sky again. She feels tiny. Tiny like a grain of sand. Tiny in this darkness, with the entire cosmos staring down at her. 'Eighteenthousand dimensions,' she thinks with her little mind. 'Eighteenthousand dimensions and I don't even know the one I inhabit, nor my own inner-world.'

It is said that when a man changes his spiritual station, a new universe is born. And that is how we create the world that we live in. And that is how this world is lightened and darkened by the turning of men's hearts. 'In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them.' -Wrote Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who can be forgiven this one time for being a Russian. Yevgeny, it seems, was onto something.

Pixi shudders and sits up. She looks at the Djinn-Boy, his heavy lashes still, his features peaceful.

"I feel like used goods," she whispers to him in the dark. And getting those words out in the open unleashes a barrage of emotions. "I feel empty. Living day to day. And then there is you." she sniffles back her snot and wipes her face. "There is only you. And I'm weak. And at 27, more clueless than I've ever been." Pixi reaches out and gently brushes his raven locks away from his eyes. "I know what I feel now. But it's all I know. And I know, that I have to stand by and let you go."

She bends over his face and plants a lingering kiss on his forehead. As her lips part and her eyes close, a tear escape her lashes and drops on his cheek. The Boy opens his eyes just as Pixi is drawing back. They look at each other for a moment, Pixi considering him nervously, and he considering her with curiosity.

"Are you ok?" he whispers eventually.
Pixi nods a shy nod and lies down on her side. The Boy turns onto his side too, to face her, and briefly strokes her cheek.

“Hey, what are the battles like?" Pixi asks, "Of your people?" The response she gets is a wind sound the Boy makes as he blows air through his lips. And with it, he turns his hand in a circular motion in the air, its fingers spread like those of a whirling dervish. And in his mind is a dry wasteland littered with whirlwinds, where monstrous Djinn clash attop monstrous steeds, his people against the Ifrit Dark ones. They both smile, and Pixi snuggles to burry her face under his chin. The Boy puts his arm around her and their eyelids come down simultaneously.

If in the distant future, someone gazes up at our stars and asks about us, let them know how we fought recklessly, how we sought desperately, and how bravely we loved. Let them know that we had the dreams of heroes, and yet because we were so painfully human, we could not believe as bravely. And let them know, how we hoped that if we sacrificed our love for our faith (or a lack thereof) then perhaps God might believe in us more than we could in Him.

In Which Being Well and Truely Lost Starts to Get to Everyone

2010-10-26T02:51:00.000-07:00

Pixi wakes with her throat on fire, and a pair of large eyes watching her the way Sufi-cat does when she wants you to chase her tubby behind around the house in a pointless game of 'try-to-catch-Sufi-cat-but-if-you-actually-do-I'll-get-pissed-at-you-fatly.' -Playful.

"Good morning, beautiful," says the Djinn-Boy lying on his side facing Pixi. "I was dreaming last night 'bout you."

Pixi blinks at him for a moment, and then realises where she is. Where she is, is lying on her abaaya which she spread out to lay the Boy on last night when they set up camp. She must have fallen asleep while watching over him. Pixi forces herself to sit up. The effort hurts her head and there is an annoying ringing in her ears like someone burst a balloon in her face. The Boy also sits up. His head hurts even more than Pixi’s does, and it’s coupled by giddy nausea. When the effort takes too much out of him, he opts to lean against the bolder they were lying in the shade of.

Pixi considers her surroundings; burnt out camp fire –check; horses disregarding her inane stare –check; Dee’s sleeping bag and various rucksacks –check; but where are her friends? Then like her aged-laptop taking its sweet time to start-up, her mind finally processes the Boy’s remark. She turns to look at him scruitinisingly.

The Boy has sweat on his upper lip and his hair looks dewy. Pixi notices then how long it's grown, now nearly reaching down to his collar bones. This thought induces a bout of embarrassment when she also notices that his unbuttoned shirt is exposing a lot more than said collar bones. 'Pish! I’ve seen this guy nekkid and didn't flinch, what the he'll is wrong with me now?' -she thinks, turning her gaze away from his chest with frustration.

In an effort to hide her discomfort she speaks, "Yeah?" -is what she says. And it comes out in her croakiest morning voice. ‘Oh good,’ she thinks then. ‘This will accentuate my I’m-so-above-caring-how-I-look-or-sound cool.’

“Yeah,” he smiles at her delayed response to his confession.

"That why you had a nose and ear-bleed simultaneously?" she further croaks.

"Eh?!" he covers his nose a little self consciously. "I did?"

"Yeah, I thought you had brain damage or something!" she rasps accusingly. "And now you’re suddenly ok. Make up your mind and save me the heart-ache: are you living or dying?"

"I prefer to stay undecided for the time being," he smirks, pulling up his legs and resting his elbows on his knees. For an 18 year-old he's got the cocky ego of an eccentric, old asshole, and his unbuttoned shirt starts getting on Pixi’s nerves. To save herself having to check her gaze every two seconds, she decides to do it up herself. She rises to the task like a tutting mother.

"Why the hell for?” she tugs at his shirt angrily, “You want to drive me from my wits?"

"That’s right," says the Boy. His words tickle her forehead as they emerge. "You're not so good at hiding your feelings when you're worried shiKtless." Pixi looks up from the third button from the top, and comes eye to eye with him. She also only realises then that she's inappropriately placed between his legs, from whence she's leaning into his torso. One part of Pixi's mind clears its moral throat and tells her she should probably relocate, but the other part is happy just where she is. In fact, it's gotten itself a bag of Doritos 'hint of lime' with which to watch the show.

'Damn you' -Pixi thinks. ‘Damn you and your pointless flirting inspite of trying to let me go. I’ve had enough of this!’ and the thought gives her the strength to pull back, stand up and even stomp her foot.

"Pish! I bloody hate you!" she yells.

"I hate you too, and I bloody love it!" he yells back, grinning mischievously.

"Shutup!"

"Fine, bitch!"

"Fine bitch yourself, you... son of a...fatherless person!"

"Pffffttt-ha ha ha haaa!" the Boy points and laughs at her. "What kinda insult is that?"

"Ufff!" Pixi turns to stomp off but runs right into La-lu and Luw.

"Hey, you're up!" La-lu pronounces cheerily, and then her face undergoes an immediate alteration to express dissaproval, “And you seriously need to fix your scarf coz you’re revealing scandalous, Turkish locks from every which direction.”

“Ufff!” Pixi ‘ufff’s again, and turns her back to everyone to unwrap and rewrap her scarf. “Better?” she gives La-lu a little twirl.

“Yep.”

"Who cares about that!” Luw exclaims. “Can we go back now? -I'm starving!" he falls to his knees and spreads his arms out in an exaggerated show of desperation. More than a starving person, he looks like a Bollywood hero declaring his love in a drawn out song-and-dance sequence.

"We only missed breakfast, you won’t starve!" La-lu scolds him.

"Where's Glorious and Dee?" Pixi asks.

"Up there," Luw points at a small hill-sized rock some distance away, atop which the two are waving their arms this way and that like overly-animated little people. "They're trying to figure out where we are on the map."

"Map?" the Djinn-Boy gets to his feet and comes to stand near them. "What map?"

"Dee's map," La-lu says simply.

"Oi!" the Boy suddenly hollers at Dee and Glorious, startling Luw, La-lu and Pixi in the process. "Stop reading that map!" and then he breaks out into a sprint.

"Don't run, stupid!" Pixi yells, running after him. A yard or two later he trips and stumbles in the dust. "You ok?" she asks, catching up.

"Stop them," he heaves. "Go. Stop them. I'm coming." Pixi does as she's told, catching up with Luw and La-lu who'd breezed past them moments ago. When they reach the giant rock they tell Glorious and Dee to come down at once.

“We've figured it out I think but some things don't add up," Glorious climbs down from the rock. Wiping sweat from his brow, he gets on his knees and spreads the map on the ground. All of them pile on top of each other like eager 9 year-olds to peer over it. "Here," he begins, "was the last rest stop. Here is that canyony thing we must have passed through last night..."

"Passed through? I thought we turned back," La-lu interrupts.

"I did too, but it was dark. And if my calculations are correct, we didn't. We came out the other side..." Says Glorious, and this is the point at which Pixi loses him. She tries very hard to follow but is distracted by La-lu's hand stroking Luw's leg. Her eyes grow large with surprise, and for the life of her she can’t quite concentrate with that happening right under her nose.

"Glorious," the Djinn-Boy pants, having just reached them with a terrible slouch. "Stop that insolent navigation at once!" they all look up.

"Wah? Why?" Dee asks, and the next thing they know the map's on fire.

"ShiKt!" they jump up and frantically start flayling their arms and legs about trying to kick dust onto it in an attempt to put out the flames. But it's no use.

"My map!" Dee exclaims with sheer remorse when it's ashen remains disentegrates into the sand.

"Sorry dude," the Boy bends over catching his breath with his hands on his knees. "Had to be done."

"You did it?!" they all cry simultaneously.

"What the F*** is wrong with you, now we're lost!" yells Glorious.

"Precisely, you Idiot!" the Boy yells back. "How else do you expect to be found?"

"Why you-" Glorious lunges for the Djinn-Boy but everyone grabs and tries to restrain him. "Unhand me, dammit! I'm gonna kick his riddle-telling ass!"

"We've probably been going around in circles trying to navigate our way through this desert all day yesterday," the Djinn-Boy tries to explain over the stream of obscenities Glorious is reciting. "You can't find Lei-lines or portals with a map! They find you!" Silence follows his words. For once his madness makes perfect sense to all of them, and Pixi wonders if perhaps the sun has gotten to their heads.

"So," says Glorious, suddenly very calm. "We just keep walking...in no particular direction?"

"We keep walking and read the signs the universe throws at us."

"Tawakul Allah," La-lu says, Whot means, in Arabic, ‘resignation in God.’

"Precisely."

“What if we’ve given up on finding portals and Lei-lines? What if we’re starving and tired and wanna go back?” Luw moans and collapses into the dust again to add dramatic effect.

“What he said,” Dee points at the prostrate Luw. The Djinn-Boy and Pixi and La-Lu sense something then. They sense disquiet in the group. The Boy looks to Glorious whose face confirms his suspicion: The three of them have discussed this already.

“After what happened last night,” Glorious starts with uncharacteristic discomfort. “And now we have no food, barely any water. It’s madness. We have to go back.” Glorious probably doesn’t realise the weight of his own words. He’s thinking logically about everyone’s safety, and he’s absolutely justified in his thinking. Yet he’s also sentencing the Djinn-Boy to death.

“That’s fine,” the Boy shrugs. “It was an air-brained idea to begin with. You guys should have never wasted your time.” He does a good job of keeping his cool but Pixi can see the disappointment through his indifference.

“I’m not going back,” Pixi says with a very severe look in her right-eye that tells everyone how frighteningly determined she is. “And I’m not forcing anyone to come along.”

“Pixi come on!” Glorious pleads. “You know we can’t leave you here!”

“Why not? It’s not like I’ll be alone. You guys have come far enough and I’m grateful.”

“Forget it, we’re not having this conversation,” Glorious snaps. “If you’re adamant on dying out here, we all die together.”

“WTF?!” Pixi says, but not in acronyms. “It’s not like I’m gonna be alone, there’s two of us!”

“Three,” La-lu volunteers herself.

“No. We stay together,” Glorious remains stern. “Why can’t you put aside your Turkish-pride for a change, and accept a kindness?”

“This has nothing to do with Turkish-pride or kindness. You are not responsible for me, and I can’t accept a kindness at your expense and that of these guys!” She points to Dee and Luw.

“No, Pixi, we’re fine. We want to come,” Dee says feeling bad for Pixi.

“Do you really?” Pixi looks him straight in the eye. “Bro, I love you. I love you all,” she turns to Luw, Glorious and La-lu respectively. “But I can’t have this on my head. You got families to think of, and this is my journey-“

“Our journey,” the Boy interrupts.

“Our journey...that I gotta take. I’m thankful you’ve accompanied us this far-” Glorious doesn’t stay to hear the end of her speech. He stomps off back to the campsite to pack and ready the horses because he refuses to back down.

In this vein they set off into the the horizon again. Waiting for nature to show them a sign, and lending their minds to all manner of morbid thoughts in the process of no-hope before hope. They ration their speech just as they ration out there water: meticulously. Not just because they’re trying to conserve humidity, but because of the awkwardness. It makes La-lu whisper when she decides she can no longer hold out on what she needs to impart to Pixi. That and the embarrassing nature of what she’s about to impart.

"Pixi," La-lu says with a worried sound. She’s given her horse up to the Djinn-Boy who lost his yesterday, and is riding on the back of Pixi's. Luw on the other hand is riding with Dee. They’d decided to switch every so often so the animals carrying a double load can take a break. But so far no one has dared break the uncomfortable silence to suggest a switch.

"Eh?" ‘eh’s Pixi.

"You know when we were looking at the map earlier..."

"Map. Earlier. Yeah?" She tries to retrieve her thoughts from the angry place they’ve been festering in to give La-lu her attention. It’s no easy feat.

"I did something really bad accidentally."

"What?"

“I stroked Luw’s leg.”

"Yeah, I noticed,” Pixi smirks.

“Why didn’t you say something!”

“What was I supposed to say? I thought maybe you guys finally hit it off or something."

"What?! Nooooooo!" La-lu cries. "I thought it was your leg!"

"Oh. I see,” Pixi says, and then she starts laughing so hard her horse gets annoyed at her. The laughter is half amused, half desperate to change her mood. And the guys look in her direction with a curiosity that begs her to share whatever it is that’s lightened her up, because they can no longer take the sombreness either. But it ebbs just as quickly as it rose when La-lu smacks her back to get her to shutup.

"Do you think he noticed?"

"Of course he noticed, silly woman!"

"He didn't seem to."

"La-lu, you really need to be careful with your stroking and poking-” Pixi starts but is cut off by Glorious suggesting that it’s time they gave Pixi and Dee’s horses a break.

“Pixi, come ride with me,” he offers in an attempt to extend the proverbial olive-branch, but Pixi is still angry. Not because he’s having second thoughts about coming. Not at all. She’s angry he’s doing her a favour when she doesn’t need it. She’s angry that he’s smothering her with his kindness, and can never understand when she tries to explain that she can’t rest easy in a friendship, and particularly in their now rather make-shift one, where there is an inequality of sacrifice and compromise. It’s not how she’s been brought up. Not how she’s learned to love and give and take.

So Pixi does something she will later regret, she ignores Glorious’s offer and climbs onto the back of the Djinn-Boy’s horse.

“I’ll ride with you, baby,” Luw jumps off the back of Dee’s horse and walks up to Glorious’s.

“Who asked you, you cRock!” Glorious says mock-angrily to shake off the disappointment of Pixi’s rebuff.

“Shutup and drive, biatch!” Luw snaps back.

“You sure you don’t want to ride with him?” the Djinn-Boy inclines his face sideways to whisper to Pixi.

“Not right now,” Pixi says, her eye-lids are growing heavy under the weight of a frown that’s knit itself on her forehead. Sleep or song is how Pixi deals best with hurt she can’t vent immediately, and the Djinn-Boy knows it.

“Perhaps you should at least make up?” he suggests.

“I don’t know how any more,” she buries her face into the back of his shoulder and the last she remembers from before they all lose each other is the Djinn-Boy telling her,

"Sing, Pixi. Sing something for me." But he's too late.

In Which There is a 3am Drive Through Sleeping Amman and in the Past Things Grow More Grim

2010-10-18T13:31:00.000-07:00

What name? What name to call that warmth which takes you by surprise when he grabs your hand, and leads you along to wherever...does it matter now? Without cause or reason. I don't even know you! Spontaneity. Like how your eyes meet across a room and the smile that breaks from the two of you is so mutually synchronised, like a deliciously private joke. And you think, I've been holding out pretty damn long -immovable as I am, like some cynical Ice Queen- but why, of all the inappropriate and incompatible people it could have been, did it have to be you? Is there some divine force laughing at me when a jolt of energy leaves me flabbergasted at the tactless forcefulness in your attitude which initially had me writing you off as a cocky asshole? Was your naivety made to mirror my lack thereof exactly? I'd like to know.

And so it ends, like a rude elbower, elbowing through the sombre crowd of the mundane, to make an inappropriate objection. On December 11 2010, 夢幻 turns 28 and a day old.

Flash back, not all the way to Petra, but later to some months after, when Kalahili and Big-sis tie the proverbial knot. Once again, Pixi is back in that place her life turned a significant page on itself, leaving her to be never ever the same again. And many a time in the midst of the celebrations she pauses to wonder if some sadistic force is at play, which keeps dragging her back here.

Afterwards, driving through the empty streets of Amman at 3am in the morning, with cheap, road-side tea and cigarettes billowing over hilarious stories of Davy-Jones's very bad luck with the Jordanian secret police, she thinks: how difficult it is to communicate our affections, when life has taken craters out from between us. This thought belongs initially to the moment in which Pixi said goodbye to Dad when she and Davy-Jones dropped him off at his hotel. It's lingered in her since then, but more specifically, it belongs to her Dad and Big-sis, to whom she wishes she could show the raw innards of her chest when it clenches with love or missing for them, but cannot. Because life has hardened us, and before its cruelty and cold, we have grown helpless and frightened.

In the passenger seat next to Davy-Jones, she wants to burry her face in her lap and cry. She wants to tell her new friend she loves her Dad and her Big-sis but they've lost too much time. Like the wasted and bitter years that weigh heavy on their words to each other, which are never enough to compensate what they truly want to say, this feeling is like a burden Pixi needs to share then and there. But She doesn't for fear of freaking Davy-Jones out, and because he probably wouldn't understand.

As the conversation turns into engineering related things that go right over her head and interest-level, she thinks of her Djinn-Boy. And him? How could she have told him how she felt when she didn't know it herself? She probably should have been appreciating the company and the kind invitation for a post-booming-wedding-drive, instead of thinking all of this. But how often do we have control over what we feel and think?

24 hours later when she’s fuming about the bastard that tried to pick her up from amongst Dubai airport’s weary-flight-delayed-passengers, she wishes she was spending another day in Amman instead of here. A further two hours later, Pixi is having that delayed breakdown she couldn’t have in Davy-Jones’s car, in some dingy Bahrain hotel after missing her connecting flight due to the delay.

Breakdowns in transit seem to be all that have marked Pixi’s life after the Boy that Never Was. When fatigue and the notion of disappearing into the fold of the nameless between spaces, Pixi finally feels alone enough to let it all break forth from her. ‘...chill babes xxx’ says the text in response to Pixi’s frustrated one intended to inform Dad of where she is. And then it comes. The dingy hotel bed creaks against Pixi’s bawling, and the breath that catches loudly with every gasping intake. ‘I’m sorry’ is all she can think, and she thinks it to God and herself and all those people she couldn’t do right by. And as she wishes there was some way to reverse, delete, erase ...sleep overtakes her.

‘Caro mi e il sono’-Michelangelo Bupnarroti nails it in Rime 247. ‘Welcome is sleep.’

More welcome sleep of stone.

Whilst crime and shame continue in the land:
My happy fortune. Not to see or hear:
Awake me not; Hush, whisper low.

And the dreams that visit her work backwards from earlier in the evening when she hugged Big-sis and her Bro Kalahili goodbye with a heavy heart, to those final days in Petra. At the end of them, she will have a night visitation she had waited for with desperate anticipation every night since the end of that trip. Every night but this night. It’s funny how we always get what we wanted only after we’ve stopped wanting it. But first:

"You guys have a funny kind of relationship, you know that?" Glorious's words are barely audible. Not just because of the dream-static that interferes as Pixi is tuning in, but because they all speak in hushed tones now. Ever since the Boy passed out and his horse ran off, a general sombreness descended on the group and they rode and rode and kept on riding like how Siberian farmers eventually lose their minds and keep on walking into the arctic waste until they die. And like those farmers, they were completely alone in the wilderness.

The last Bedouin they'd encounterred was a scraggly looking guy with goats and a chain smoker’s rasp, who rasped at them about an hour ago. The kids that were with him, his children or neices or what ever they were, pestered them for money and buscuits. Of all the random things to ask for in the middle of a vast nothing; biscuits. And not even cookies or crackers or bread. Biscuits. They said the foreign word with an American accent. Hearing it was like the rest stops with their cheap China-import souvenirs that made absolutely no sense in this context. Those wooden frogs that make a croaking noise when you run a stick over their backs; marble buddahs and eggs; cheap jewellery made in India. 'Why didn't these people make and sell their own handcrafts? They'd make more money that way.' -Pixi thought and then sufferred a pang of pissed-ness at the long arm of globalisation.

But back to the biscuit-wanting kids; skin browned by the sun and hair nearly blond. Their eyes shone like they knew better than you. Pixi and La-lu initially thought they were cute, until something ugly happened. One of the little girls asked Pixi if she was Muslim. Yes, Pixi nodded. And then the little girl did an unexpected something that freaked the hell out of Pixi. She pointed her finger at the heavens above and then spat at her feet. To top off her blaspheming she smiled a cute smile that sent shivers up and down Pixi and La-lu. That's when they knew that they'd crossed that border which separated the UNESCO national heritage site with its naive tourists on their guided tours, and THIS -where ever it was, was where things weren't quite right.

Now there is just wilderness, and the fast descending sun on the Western horizon. The temperature has dropped and darkness is falling steadily.

"Do we?" Pixi asks, a little self consciously. Her relationship with the Djinn-Boy, is not something she wants to be discussing with Glorious of all people.

"Yeah, sometimes you're like siblings, at each others throats, mirrorring each others habits, hell you even look similar on some days."

"Eh! You saying I look like a boy?!"

"No it's that gangly, willowy presence that’s a bit androgynous, that you both share."

"So now you're saying we're like a pair of hermaphrodites?"

"No I'm not. You know what I'm saying."

"I don't but any way," Pixi shrugs.

"My point was that other times I can't decide if you're parental with each other or..."

"Or?"

"Something else," he shrugs and gives Pixi a look that says he knows all too well that sometimes the feeling and the time for it picks you, not the other way around. And Pixi wonders, what inexplicable and subconscious tides turn beneath our placid surface, which rise and ebb in response to one person and not another?

Pixi rides with the Djinn-Boy slumped in the back of her saddle. They had to tie him to her at the waist to stop him from slipping off when her horse does speed, though Pixi avoids this. He seems so brittle, so precious to her, that it aches even to grip him tightly.

Raising her face she sees Venus, what they call Zuhre in the tongue of her ancestors, make its fashionable appearance in the sky overhead. And as the heavens blacken other stars follow suit Pixi watches it and wonders whether the story is true, of the most beautiful woman on earth, who tempted Harut and Marut from their angelic purity.

'Who will I ask about such obscure things when you are gone?' she thinks to the Boy. 'You say you came back to let me go. So why did you come back? And how lonely will I feel when you’re gone. How bored, when trapped in an ordinary conversation of some ordinary courtship ritual, which is only clumsiness to me?' Pixi shivers and the Djinn-Boy, stirring between unconsciousness and sleep, burrows his face into the back of her shoulder.

The group enter one if those rocky, narrow gorges, hemmed by cliffs soaring up to 80 meters. The cliff-tops nearly meet overhead, and with the sky a mere slit, everything is cast into pitch darkness. Sounds echo and reverberate in a funny way all around them, and Pixi can no longer see her horses head. She raises her hand up to her face and finds she can’t even see that.

“You’ve got a flashlight?” says Glorious from somewhere, and as if in response a beam pierces the blackness like a light-saber. It dances up ahead where Dee and Glorious are leading the party.

“Of course I do, unlike you I came well prepared!”

“Oh thank heavens,” goes La-lu’s voice.

“What else have you got?”

“A sleeping bag, a Swiss army knife, a first aid kit, some fly repellent, a compass, an airplane blanket I nicked off Air Malta for their shitty service...”

“You got food?” asks Luw.

“No.”

“Fat lot of good,” says Glorious.

“Like you’ve done better, smart-ass!”

“Guys!” La-lu’s voice breaks up their bickering. There is a nervousness in it that is instantly contagious. “I felt something brush against my leg.”

“Eh?”

“Maybe it was a jackal,” suggests Pixi “There’s a breed of Jackal in this part of the world that excretes a musk which it sprays at its prey with one flick of its tail. Get a whiff of it, and a grown man will follow its trail blindly to the jackal's lair. Then it's certain death.”

“National Geographic?”

“Nah, my Bro-in-law-to-be, Kalahili,” says Pixi, but before anyone can dispute the possibility with the obvious fact that no jackal could be tall enough to brush up against La-lu’s leg while she’s mounted on a horse, Pixi’s steed whinnies.

The fear of horses is a frightening thing. When an animal which inspires such calm and dignity loses its cool, you have much reason to believe that something unsavoury is amuck. With the whinnying of one horse, an orchestra of whinnying, neighing and snorting commences. Just as Pixi finds she’s losing control of her horse, Luw falls off his, and the animal takes advantage of the opportunity to leg it, nearly trampling him in the process.

“Dismount!” Pixi yells, and untying herself from the Boy, gets off her horse. Dee goes to Luw's rescue with his flashlight.

"I'm ok! I'm ok!" Luw declares, more in surprise than as an assurance to the others.

"Let's turn back," says Glorious, and giving La-lu a hand with restraining her steed, leads the way. Holding its reins tightly, Pixi tries to calm her own horse with her hand against its neck, whisperring 'Euzubillah' into its ear. With fear in the pit of their stomachs, they all turn and walk back the way they came. With enough time and distance, the animals begin to heave sighs of relief. It's a calming sound, and so to is the little nudge Pixi's horse gives her with its nose. Eventually Luw ventures an attempt to break the hevy silence.

“I thought my life flashed before my eyes,” he says.

“Yeah?” asks Glorious. “What did it look like?”

“Yours,” he snorts, “and it was some piece of work.” The guys chuckle, albiet with still a hint of enxiety in their voices, but La-lu and Pixi don't. La-lu has just realised Pixi has fallen behind, and she stops.

"Pixi, is he ok?" she asks when she sees her friend trying to pull the Djinn-Boy off of the horse. "Guys, come help," she calls back to the others as she dashes to Pixi's side. When they reach her she's sittining in the dust with the Boy in her arms. Trails of dry blood cake his ears and nose. And with eyes shut she rocks from side to side like a grieving mother.