Tower of Dreams

That night he slept dreamlessly in the cool air perfumed with jasmine and the nightingale's song, or if he had dreams they were not of the lucid variety; maybe he heard Buthaina's voice from around the corner of a village street, but she didn't wake him with her torment. The niacin had finally kicked in, or maybe there was another reason: maybe it was because he had heard her call, had already, in some deep part of himself, decided to go to her. It was ridiculous, of course, he realized when he woke up with the fresh breeze of early morning gently lifting his curtains in the pale sunlight, the plan fully formed in his mind. While Cairo was technically exo-area, he was sure it wasn't what Haseeb Al Rahman would have had in mind had he been mentationally present to deliver his recommendation for R&R leave. Cairo contained little of either rest or relaxation these days, between economic collapse, political instability, and impending earthquakes. And it was the direction exactly opposite the one he should go to leave his obsessive dreams behind, he knew, since in that city lived the actress Aida, the alter ego of the dream-girl Buthaina. If he had wanted to kid himself, he could have told himself he was going to Cairo as part of his dig, to follow a lead given by his subconscious about the source and meaning of his Image. Or he could have pretended he was on a spiritual quest in search of himself, to find out why he had dreamed and hallucinated the movie star. He could even have pretended he was going for pure science, to investigate a phenomenon in apparent contradiction to established neurosociological theory. But he was too old to play games; he knew that the real reason he was going wouldn't stand up under logical scrutiny, and it was this: he had heard the dream-girl Buthaina beaten to agony, had seen her broken, bloodied body, held her cold, delicate hands, and he had fallen in love with her like any bumpkin first-year digger falling for his Image. Yet by some incredible stroke of luck or misfortune, this Image lived, in the person of an Egyptian movie star; and since she had a physical existence somewhere in the world, Blaine would go to her. An exhilaration went through him as he padded on cool floor tiles into the tiny whitewashed kitchen to put on the teapot, the kind of feeling he remembered from his childhood when, waking early in the morning, he had realized it was the first day of summer vacation. He hadn't had that feeling in a very long time. * * * Blaine could have taken an EgyptAir or Royal Jordanian flight from Amman to Cairo, but the Image-digger imperative for local atmosphere had accustomed him to sharing theserveesetaxis that middle-class Arab travelers used. He caught one in an oil-stained parking lot in Jericho between a low-rent hotel and an orange grove, where dozens of taxis parked in the early morning, drivers calling out the names of the cities for which they were bound, the fresh, cool air holding the fragrance of the trees, the smells of motor oil and roasting peanuts sold by hawkers. * * * The heat of the Sinai Peninsula made the remembered temperature of the Jordan Valley seem mild by comparison. The venerable supercharged Mercedes taxi Blaine had caught flew rattling along the flat, heat-rippled Suez road with all its windows open, and the air that blasted in on the riders was broiling. At intervals they halted at rest stop lean-tos built of palm fronds or corrugated iron. As he pissed on the sand behind the lean-tos the sun was like knife blades on Blaine's head and shoulders, the air almost unbreathable, and the vast stillness of the endless yellow plain seemed also an artifact of the heat, asNasir, Jamil is the author of 'Tower of Dreams' with ISBN 9780553763164 and ISBN 0553763164.