Utopia Read online

  UTOPIA

  AHMED KHALED TOWFIK

  Translated by Chip Rossetti

  Contents

  Part One Predator

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part Two Prey

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Three Predator

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Four Prey

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Five Predator

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Glossary

  A Note on the Translator

  The Utopia mentioned here is an imaginary place, as are the characters who live in and around it, even though the author knows for certain that this place will exist soon. Any resemblance to places and individuals in our present reality is purely coincidental.

  Ahmed Khaled Towfik

  Indeed I live in the dark ages!

  A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens

  A hard heart. He who laughs

  Has not yet heard

  The terrible tidings.

  Ah, what an age it is …

  – Bertolt Brecht, translated by H.R. Hays

  Part One

  Predator

  1

  It was like the famous old poster for the film Platoon. That’s what ran through my mind at the time.

  The reason was that I have that poster hanging over my bed.

  Willem Dafoe looks up to the sky – nothing separates him from it – lifting his arms as if in a final prayer. He has fallen to his knees after the bullets have ripped him apart, at the moment that death becomes larger than life itself, at the moment that death becomes a kind of artistic beauty.

  The scene was fearsome, especially since it wasn’t on the television screen. Everything was real and terrible and cruel and, and …

  And seductive.

  Please don’t deny it.

  I saw him standing, worn out by exhaustion. With the loss of blood and hunger wearing him down, he couldn’t undertake this pursuit to the end. I saw him bend over, his palms on his knees, trying to catch his breath. Then I saw him look up as the helicopter slowly and calmly circled around him. It had all the time in the world: there is no target clearer than an unarmed man in the sands of the desert. A man worn out by running. A man worn out by hunger. A man worn out by desperation.

  Don’t fight it, you idiot! What would a few more moments of living with the Others give you? What haven’t you accomplished in the past twenty years that you planned to accomplish if you’d stayed alive? This flight of yours is no different from a cockroach fleeing on the kitchen wall, or an amoeba sliding under the lens of a microscope. It’s the call of instinct, that’s all. It’s a flight reaction that nature planted within you. You should learn how to disregard it so you can get the rest you deserve.

  The machine guns burst into life and he looked up. Yes, those shots are for your sake. They trace that long line in the sand, the line that passes by you. Willem Dafoe in the Platoon poster.

  It occurred to me that film directors were stupid to show someone hit by bullets falling instantly to the ground. No, this man looked up and it seemed as if he wanted to say something, then he fell to the ground, his face in the sand.

  Germinal gasped in terror but I noticed that glimmer in her eyes: the glimmer of excitement, no doubt about it. Her chest rose and fell. Our fingers touched as we stood there behind the wire watching the helicopter descend, throwing up a cloud of sand around it. Then the American guard jumped out of it to examine the corpse. He kicked it with the tip of his boot, then bent over to feel the carotid artery.

  He gave the thumbs-up sign.

  ‘Lovely!’ he shouted in English.

  Then he ran towards the helicopter and in seconds the giant mythical beast ascended, having completed its hunting assignment. All these guards were retired Marines – I don’t know why – and they certainly weren’t lacking in physical fitness.

  Germinal gasped in terror.

  Germinal gasped in ecstasy.

  Death: the great game we haven’t yet played.

  I stand in front of the mirror.

  I make sure my hair is shaved in the well-known style of the Mohawk Indians: shaved on the sides, with a tall purple tuft in the middle, like a rebellious wild rooster. My chest is bare except for several bulky necklaces covered with skulls and voodoo icons. I’m not a devil-worshipper; in fact, I don’t believe in the existence of anything at all, but those things look provocative on my chest.

  The tattoo is strange, too. Girls here like it. My shorts are carefully designed to show off my legs in the most macho way. Sometimes I go barefoot, but not today. I put the new ring through my nose, and the other ring in my eyebrow. I won’t wear the tongue stud today. Then, patiently, I start colouring my teeth: red for the canines and yellow for the incisors. Blue for the molars. This dye is excellent and doesn’t come off easily. They say it isn’t toxic, but who cares about that? If only it were toxic!

  I put in the new contact lenses that turn your pupils white. It has an exciting effect on girls when you look at them with eyes gone white, like you’re the Grim Reaper. It really blows them away.

  I make sure that the wound on my forehead is open. I meticulously manipulate the edge of it so it looks bloody. Wounds are a turn-on, no doubt about it. It’s a trend that appeared two years ago, and now there are people who specialise in it. The important thing is for the wound to look as grotesque as possible, and artificial, too, so people who see it won’t be disgusted. There’s a real art to it.

  An Israeli doctor who specialises in this art cut this wound for me. He said he studied it in New York. His name was Eli. He was a nice guy. He told me his father got a similar injury in the 1973 war with the Egyptians. He asked me if I knew anything about that: I told him that I had an uncle who had died in that war, but I didn’t know the details. It’s been fifty years since those events. I don’t know why – at some point – the Egyptians used to hate Israelis. But I’ve got no interest in understanding those things. I might go to war, if I was asked to, for one reason: to break up life’s routine. Walking through a hail of bullets in the desert with dead bodies scattered all around! How awesome would that be?

  In Utopia, where death retreats behind barbed wires and becomes nothing but a game that adolescents dream of …

  Sixteen years old, and you don’t belong anywhere except Utopia. You’re a Utopian resident, softened by a life of luxury and boredom. You end up unable to tell an American from an Egyptian from an Israeli. You end up unable to tell yourself apart from other people. If it weren’t for the remnants of lust in your veins, you couldn’t tell men from women.

  Who am I? Let’s not talk about names. What’s the value of names when you’re no different from anyone else?

  Salim bey told me, ‘You read a lot. You’re crazy.’

  I told him that reading, as far as I’m concerned, is a cheap drug. I use it only to withdraw from my conscious self. In the past, they used to read in order to gain consciousness. Imagine that!

  I’m no longer a child. I’m past sixteen. I’ve read every book I could get my hands on until I’d had enough. Books are a rare commodity here, but I found a treasure trove of them with Salim bey, the editor-in-chief of that newspaper, who lives two hundred metres from my house. He has lots and lots of books, and I began reading as a challenge, because Mourad doesn’t read, and neither does Larine. It’s beautiful to do something they can’t stand doing.

  For some reason, I fell in love with this habit, and found in it magical worlds I could
escape to whenever I wanted. Salim bey would watch me in amazement when I visited his office, saying, ‘Believe me, son, there’s nothing of interest in those books. I buy them because they make the office look sophisticated, but life is your only teacher.’

  I didn’t reply. I would take ten books at a time from him, exchanging them for some Libidafro, which I’d stolen from my father. Salim is a widower who hasn’t remarried. So I can guess what he plans on doing with the Libidafro. This way, before the age of sixteen, I’d read most of the books I’d found on philosophy and religion, as well as novels. I don’t like reading about politics at all, and I take no interest in it. The same goes for history. I also read a lot on the Internet, and I seem to have read more than I should have because I can no longer stand seeing another book. No doubt that’s why I’m more cultured than my friends.

  At my relatively young age, I am pretty much satisfied that there is nothing new under the sun, and that not a single thing exists that you can learn any more. There’s a social imbalance that has led to the state we’re in, but it’s an imbalance that should continue. Everyone who tries to reform it risks losing us everything. This is a situation like McCarthyism in the United States, when Americans in the last century felt that they had to defeat every leftist trend because it threatened their very existence. That’s what Salim bey told me.

  I’ve been intimate with every girl I found appealing, and I’ve tried all kinds of drugs, even the new phlogistine imported from Denmark, which smells like lemon. They say it’s extremely expensive, but what does ‘extremely expensive’ mean? We chew this phrase in our mouths without knowing its meaning. What I do know is that it takes you far away the moment you put a drop of it on the skin of your forearm, and with it, you can see those seductive flames it gets its name from. You come back to your senses hours later, only to realise you need more.

  I had started experimenting with marijuana – no big deal – and I’ve tried ecstasy and LSD. The problem with the latter is that you really can’t be sure you’re still alive until you come down from it. In every group, you have to have one person who doesn’t take it so he can keep an eye on the others: they call that person the ‘trip-sitter’. When euphoria penetrates the trippers’ minds, jumping off a balcony, setting fire to themselves or staring at the sun until they go blind seem like very logical things to do. It’s exciting, but I wouldn’t like to be blind for the rest of my life.

  I’ve tried lots of drugs. We buy them from the American guards, but the problem with drugs is that they lose their excitement if they’re easily available. An important part of the game is that they should be forbidden and hard to get hold of; you should already be worried about your next hit as you take the first one. When drugs are available all the time, you lose any pleasure in them. They become boring and vulgar.

  It doesn’t help that my parents aren’t used to watching me. No one interferes in my life in any way. I have a right to take anything in any quantity and at any price. If I can’t, then they shouldn’t have had me.

  Being a parent isn’t that much work. I could be a father to a hundred sons if you gave me a thousand women, and I’d thank you for them.

  Today I told Larine that Suzanne is pregnant.

  That’s become routine in my life. I don’t know why nature endowed me with such fertility. My father only had me, and I don’t believe he was capable of having other children. But I came into the world as a real force of nature: I touch a girl and, a month later, she comes to me saying she’s missed her period. What girl over twelve here hasn’t had that experience and got used to it? In any case, the result is the same: I’ll get a cheque from Larine and give it to the girl; the girl will head to the medical centre to get rid of this nightmare. A one-day operation ends it quickly – it’s just that the girl is forced into a life without sex for two months. Really boring.

  Suzanne … Katie … Maya … Germinal …

  But I prefer the last of them for some reason. It isn’t love, of course. Is she sexually exciting? Maybe. But I no longer know if the girl is a turn-on or not since they all look alike down to the last detail.

  In exasperation, Larine told me: ‘Don’t you do anything else with your life except sleep with girls? It’s getting tiresome.’

  ‘Maybe I’m a lecherous pig,’ I said as I stretched out my leg on the table in front of me. ‘It’s not my fault. It’s hormones.’

  ‘If only that was the case, but I really can’t imagine you feeling pleasure or desire. You’re doing it out of boredom, that’s all.’

  ‘Maybe I am bored,’ I said in the same tone. ‘It’s still not my fault.’

  What can you do in this artificial paradise? You sleep, you take drugs, you eat until food makes you sick, you vomit until you can recover the enjoyment of eating, you have sex (it’s weird that you notice how boredom makes your sexual behaviour aggressive and sadistic). If you knew another way for a person to live his life, I’d be happy if you could tell me about it.

  But I’ve found a way.

  I’m no longer a child, as I told you. Ramy went hunting and he had a wonderful time. Shadi did it. Akmal tried it and couldn’t keep anything from us. He showed us the souvenir he’d brought back from there. He seemed to have been under the influence of hashish, that vile drug they used to take at the turn of the century. Of course, in the year 2020, phlogistine has become the name of the game.

  I decided to try hunting for myself.

  It’s Utopia, where looking for a way to pass every minute of your life consumes you.

  2

  I know why Rasim did it.

  Sixteen years old, and centuries of accumulated experiences. Like the Roman emperors, there’s nothing I haven’t tried and nothing I haven’t experienced. There’s nothing new to stimulate your curiosity or your enthusiasm in Utopia. Nothing changes. Sometimes it seems to me that we are prisoners, and the people outside are the free ones. It reminds you of the Nazi concentration camps you see in war movies.

  Utopia, the isolated colony that the rich created on the North Coast to protect themselves from the sea of angry poverty outside, and that now fences in everything they might want.

  I can show you its landmarks: the giant gates, the electric fence, the security patrols run by SafeCo Inc., a company mostly staffed by former Marines. Sometimes one of the poor tries to sneak in without permission, and the helicopter hunts him down and kills him – just like it did in that scene I can’t get out of my head.

  Beyond that there’s the Garden District, which has been set aside for schools – to convince parents that they are still ‘those kind of people’ – and for houses of worship, with its scattering of mosques, churches and synagogues. Some people here still insist on praying to a supreme being they can’t see. Anyway, the younger generation has got rid of this habit. I think the adults cling to all that because they’re afraid of losing everything in an instant – of losing their privilege, of finding themselves on the outside. They still don’t feel that they deserve the life they’re living, whereas the younger generation has come into the world believing everything is theirs by birthright. Anyway, the adults have given up advising their children to follow in their footsteps.

  In my opinion, there is another important reason: the adults are crazy about combining the traits of wealth and piety. The idea that wealth and piety go together has seemingly been carved into the brains of Egyptian parents since time immemorial. It’s that image of Hajj Abdul-Sami getting off the plane returning from the Hijaz, his expensive abaya on his shoulders as he hands out money left and right with a dignified, stately smile on his face, with the scent of his costly cologne, and his golden prayer beads. It seems as though that image is really carved into our parents’ minds.

  I’ve read a little about religions and, in my mind, piety is linked to the idea of renouncing the world. But all this piety won’t convince me that the pious aren’t addicted to liquor and aren’t continually raping the women – and men – of the Others. They made their money
from the Others’ flesh – from their dreams, their hopes, their pride and their health. So the things they do seem weird to me. But it’s their business anyway.

  The Malls District. This is where you can buy phlogistine unofficially from some of the police. Next you see the mansions: the mansion of Alawi bey, the iron king. The mansion of Adnan bey, the meat king. The mansion of my dad, the pharmaceuticals king. Then the private airport: the airport is there, of course, so that you won’t be forced to go outside. In the past, my people were obsessed by the notion of having to flee to the airport if the Others on the outside revolted – the trip to the airport would be difficult, terrifying and dangerous. The Others would block the path of their cars and rip their passengers to shreds.

  I know these things because I read a lot. There are a lot of stories, beginning with the French Revolution, when mobs roamed the streets of Paris and stuck the breasts of the Princesse de Lamballe on pikes, and ending with the Iranian revolution in the 1970s, when the director of SAVAK – if I remember correctly – found his car carried on the mob’s shoulders, with him in it, and then could find no way out of the situation except to stick his gun in his mouth and pull the trigger. My God! Even as I write these words, I can feel a shudder of delight! A gun in your mouth … cold metal … and a squeeze that ends it all!

  Afraid of this trip to the airport, my people decided to build their own private airports inside their communities. As time passed, there was no longer a danger of revolution, but the airports remained where they were, as a luxury.

  When you’ve crossed the farthest boundary of consciousness, you realise that consciousness expands to include within itself other boundaries, ruled by habit, boredom and monotony. Even pissing in the kitchen sink seems reasonable and boring.

  The council hall. A thick cloud of tobacco smoke. The giant office in the Association Building, and the look of wisdom in the eyes of the adults. The ticking of the clock. Words. Words. I’ve heard them so often they no longer mean anything.