Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) (28 page)

“That’s a Christian thing, actually.”

“Christian...Jew...” Salman smirked a provocative little smirk.

“Sunni
...Shiite...” Dio countered.

“Sufi.” Salman’s smirk morphed into a wry smile.

“Should’ve known.” Dio sighed. “You sound like a monk.” Salman laughed quietly to himself at Dio’s observation.

“You can ignore what I’m telling you if that is where your heart guides you. You’re an
Israeli, after all: self-righteousness is in your nature.”

“I don’t know whether to be offended or just
agree, honestly...” Dio admitted.

“I should be clear,” Salman
amended. “I do not mean it as, necessarily, a bad thing. After all...when a people has been wronged so often and so widely as yours, it is commendable...and entirely correct, that they should approve of themselves and their rightness. It speaks to resilience, and fortitude, and is a testament to the strength of their Faith. There is, perhaps, too fine a line between believing the self to be right, and dismissing all others as wrong, even to the point of tragic violence and cruelties.” Salman paused, apparently considering: “Though, again...surrounded by those who denied the very happening of my greatest tragedy, and, of course, my very right to exist – to be – in this world? I cannot be certain that my own reaction would not be similarly
wrathful
.”

“I
– ” Dio attempted to respond, but began to cough vigorously, sending vicious shockwaves of sharp pain through his lungs and chest. He forced back the reflexive instinct to curl up and cry. Thanks to Salman’s ointment, his feet were numb and humming with dull, anaesthetised warmth. But throughout the rest of his body, the pain was, if anything, getting worse.

“Would you like me to leave you to rest?” Salman offered. Dio shook his head.

“I’ve had enough rest...and I don’t want to be alone with my thoughts.” he clarified. Salman nodded. For a moment, they sat in silence. Dio was grateful when Salman started to speak. The distraction kept the worst of the pain at bay.

“It must have struck you at one time or another as strange
– as it has with me; many times – the divide between our peoples. We are the same more than we are different, after all. You and I...a Jew and a Muslim: we are both men of The Book. Earlier yet, and still; us and ours are people of sand and suffering.”

“Sand and suffering. Truer words were never spoken
...” Dio mumbled a quiet affirmative.

“I think on what we share all too often. We are divided
– only; it seems to me – by competing claims to the legitimate representation of Allah’s intended path for his creations. And yet, The Book...
These Books
...are written by men. Therefore, must all wisdom to be found there not be measured against the fallibility of the authors? Authors who were Prophets, yes – peace be unto them – but men nonetheless: with all the folly and weakness that this state of being is known to confer.”

“I remember
...not so long ago...I said almost the exact same thing to someone.” Salman nodded. Under his breath, drifting – ever so slightly – away, Dio murmured: “She had purple eyes, that glowed.” Salman hadn’t appeared to hear his final words.

“It is far from a difficult insight to arrive at. And yet
...few do.” He sighed, shaking his head before continuing on: “When approached in such a way as this...all that is written – or so it seems to me – blurs into relativity and approximation. All that which we hold as inviolable, I cannot help but feel, becomes a mere matter of perspective. These thoughts, some might say – and the words spoken in defence of them – are a great blasphemy. But I have thought them a million times and more...and spoken them out loud less times but still many...and yet: here I stand. Still I prosper.”

“My father used to say that God was a great philosopher and a poet, but also a bit of a drunk.” Dio smiled, letting the memory wash over him. “He had good ideas, my father would say
– great ideas – but they always came out slurred and absurd. The people that saw what he was trying to say took his words, and wrote them down. But making sense of a drunkard is an act of translation; and much of the original meaning was lost or distorted in the final publication.” Salman snorted with amusement.

“This is the heart of i
t, my friend. The glory of the true Word of Allah cannot be captured, let alone conveyed, by man. How could it be? To imagine that any one man...any faint and fallible Human voice...is capable of this, should be considered a most profound heresy; a true, narcissistic idolatry, of men dedicated to the worship of stories told by other men. And yet, this is beyond the reasoning of the most of the faithful. Though, in truth, they cannot be blamed. Theirs is to follow the path laid out by those who trod it before them. But those who first cut the path from dirt and rock? Certainly one might observe that they may have lacked a certain...foresight, as to how their words might be taken up.”

“But
...you’re a Muslim.” Dio observed in the form of a barely audible croak, referring – opaquely, he hoped – to the Islamic belief that the Quran constituted the absolute, literal, and unabridged transcription of God’s message to mankind.

“I am, yes.” Sal smirked, meeting Dio’s eyes. There was something playful, there. “Do you believe that the Jews and Christians hold a patent on free thought, my friend? On personal reinterpretation of the parameters of one’s faith? The
true spirit of Islam: too often ignored, I fear...is a fundamentally humble and universally accessible simplicity of premise: submission...which allows us access to a conduit of transcendence through which a personal relationship with Allah can be wrought. We have no Church; we have no Temple. Our sacred places are sites of learning. The greatest ever seen; or so they once were. Narrowness of mind laid us low indeed; but narrowness of mind is too Human a trait and too broad in manifestation to be more or less a characteristic of one or another Human group. We all suffer from it...whether from unseen veins deep within ourselves, or from our concessions to those around us who fail to consider those entities and objects with which they share their existence from perspectives other than their own...”

Dio allowed his eyes to flicker shut as Salman continued to disgorge the contents of his mind. There wa
s a poetic cadence to his words. Words which, Dio knew, were meant to protect him from silence. Words that the Israeli appreciated more than he knew how to express.

“
...But as a Muslim, yes, we believe that the Prophet Mohammed – May Allah honour him and grant him peace – conveyed the true and complete Word of Allah. To reject this precept is to reject the foundation of Islam, you see: to be another thing entirely from a Muslim. Even so, one must assume the hidden addendum: that, being a man like any other man, Mohammed – peace be unto him – transcribed that Word in a form abridged by the limitations of Human language and the Human mind. I have often wondered, also: what true believer would make the argument that the narrative of Allah’s Will could be transfigured, in all its glory, into the bounded conceptual space connoted by any number of hand-scrawled, two dimensional shapes inked onto paper? The very greatest works of man, after all, are mere shadows and banal imitations of the divine forms of the plane beyond. How could one be so blind as to imagine man’s representation of the doctrine of Heaven would be excepted from this rule? The Word is, yes, The Book. But The Book? The Book is not the Word.”

Dio thought back to the conversations he and his father had shared during his teenage years; discussing the examples of common
-sense social etiquette, hygiene rituals, and rules for healthy living dispersed throughout the Old Testament; invaluable at their time but, in many cases, outmoded in the present; preserved and adhered to dogmatically, to varying degrees and by various sects.

“In practice if not by design, then: the closest that the Prophets of the Book
– peace be unto them – could ever have hoped to come to describing the message of Allah in its authentic and complete form – as it was when handed down to them by Allah and His messengers – is by way of metaphor. Metaphor and prose...poetry and allusion, which hint – but no more than this – at the true form of the Faith that we: those who seek to know Him...begin to discover as we turn our gaze inward, and into the universal truth buried, always, within us.”

As the words continued to flow from Salman, Dio found himself agreeing, and feeling that he was hearing
– from the outside – reasoning to reflect the inner, emotional disquiet he had felt all his life; his response to the seeming dissonance between the Faith of others, and his Faith.

“The Book, my friend, is why we must
have Faith; those ideas, that is, which are alluded through – though often obscured behind – the veil of devotion that the scriptures of the Prophets – peace be unto them – comprise. The greatest fault of our peoples – those people, that is, known foremost for their devotion to the Word as it is written in The Book – is the treatment of the flawed, manmade iteration of Allah’s message as a tool by which we attempt to justify having Faith.” Salman refreshed the supply of ointment coating his fingers, continuing to gently massage Dio’s tortured soles. “This – these words that I place in your hands to do with as you will – are a gift from one good and Faithful man to another.”

“They’re good words.” Dio nodded restfully.

“I have struggled, in my life, to envision the Universe as it is, containing – as it does – both myself, and the object of my Faith and devotion. I have struggled to see the way that we are located in relation to one another: Him and I. Faith, I have found, is a lightness; an easement, for the dim and simple-minded...while it is, conversely, a great and terrible burden on the shoulders of those naturally given to questioning, evaluation, and doubt. Ultimately, my friend: no Book...no dogma, or scripture, or scholarly consensus can reveal to you the face of Allah, or the truth of Him, or the truth of His intentions for you in isolation from his intentions for others. You must look within, as I say, and know Him as He exists in that place from whence your Faith derives: That place where love of Allah and love of oneself are one and the same.”

“To what end?” Dio murmured, mesmerised by the wax and wane of Salman’s soliloquy.

“To that place where all ends intersect.” Salman bowed his head.

§§§

Dio had been Wright’s game. He and Yvonne, both. It was a strange feeling, knowing that one’s continued existence relied on the perverse fascination of a card-carrying sociopath. Certainly...Dio was no longer naïve enough to genuinely trust that Wright would leave him be out of respect.

That he had almost been a part of it haunted him. It was something
that he knew he would have to learn to live with: the knowledge that he was, if not responsible for...then complicit in...what was happening. But, as Yvonne had shown him...there were worse things in this world than misery born of guilt.

As the days bled into weeks and the weeks into months, Dio’s wounds healed and he b
egan to venture out into Qabatiya. One day, Salman asked him to walk with his son, Ibrahim, to Ebn Al-Beetar: the nearby boys school. He’d walked silently, that first day, worried that he might be recognised as an Israeli. As it turned out, he had nothing to worry about. Ibrahim – deftly; impressing Dio with his quick wits – had explained him away as his father’s cousin, and that had appeared to be that. Strangers in the street wished him peace and good health, and he soon learned to respond without fear of his accent. He slowly began to realise – as he had always known, on a theoretical level – that people were, by and large, people: far more interested in living their lives and finding what pleasures they could in the world than functioning as cogs in other people’s grandiose, ideological vendettas.

The walk became a daily ritual, and he often wandered through the local market on the way back to Salman’s house. He became fond of his the brief, regular exchanges he began to have with local merchants and vendors
: his Arabic steadily improving as time went by. One day, he was invited to play backgammon with a group of men – all middle aged and older – who frequented the market’s small cafe on Wednesday mornings...smoking their Narghila pipes and enjoying round upon round of playfully barbed political debate. Wednesday mornings became a running commitment...and the highlight of Dio’s schedule. Inevitably, when he returned home afterwards, Salman would tease him about his coffee-and-smoke scented clothes, and mockingly warn him against falling in with ‘unsavoury elements’.

Every part of his life: every boring chore
, and repetitive responsibility; every sedate conversation and playful exchange; every game of backgammon and puff of a Narghila was a pleasure, to him. Not merely because of how long it had been since his life had been simple and quiet...but because, every so often – surrounded by the normal, unthreatening, and placidly reassuring – he was able to forget. Just a detail or two. Just for a moment. This had become, to Dio, the definition of happiness: forgetting.

Periodically, of course, the wider world stepped in
; making forgetting – for a time – impossible. He was vaguely aware of the goings-on of the world beyond Qabatiya; outbreaks of the 96 virus waxed and waned in the larger cities...carving a swathe of gore and madness through the Middle East, Europe, and beyond. The death; the degradation...it was on a scale not seen since the Black Plague. A small community, however – like many other small communities – Qabatiya remained largely insulated from the tribulations. As the world around continued to collapse into chaos...somehow, Qabatiya remained safe. Vital supplies – though supplied increasingly and, eventually: entirely by travelling merchants – still flowed through Qabatiya. It was, in Dio’s estimation, nothing short of a miracle that, until that point, the 96 virus had not accompanied them. Though, of course: he knew that it was probably only a matter of time.