Call me Raven.
I was a guest for an unknown reason in a Disneyland desert. My host was Darius, frustrated, masculine and mysterious but open to me as we made moves to unknown ends in a future Saudi Arabia. I stayed in his monorail apartment 400 feet above the metropolis and we made the vast circumnavigation at 100 miles per hour. It was an area the size of Houston and as we ringed it ever so smoothly I could not discern our motive power or what kind of structure kept his studio from shaking. I peered out the inner window through gauze curtains at a marvel of gold plated buildings in fantastic shapes. Statuary and sail shaped mosques. Flowing lagoons with pale blue painted concrete bottoms surrounded massive curved structures. Every edifice was an aqua and gold monument to moorish architectures. It was stunning.
We arrived at some sector and descended our building arriving at a plaza cafe. It was uncharacteristically linear, but exactly as pristine and new as everything else in the city - a city it seemed with no automobile traffic. Everyone walked and it was never crowded.
Prior to our arrival we had been stranded in the desert zone, an ecological disaster area with no cell phone coverage. A bank of rotary phones were our only communication and panicked our sensibilities when operators asked us for directions. The rates were obscene we only had seconds to alert our rescuers to our location. The streets were dirt and oil and sand and every low building looked as if it were from a wild west town only built up in stucco and blasted with shit colored earth by the scirocco. As the oily grit wind subsided I consulted my map written on parchment, hand drawn telling me I was in zone 3 of 3. That this was the edge of the civilized world.
But now on the pebbled pavement in the futuristic plaza under braided ficus there was only temperate sunshine and quiet. The place was deserted and Darius sat still staring off into the monumental distance. In the open kitchen behind a glass partition, silent workers eyed us suspiciously hovering over their sterno lit boiling trays of hummus and meats. And then it happened.
The mother and daughter crossed between us in surprisingly drab attire and sat without speaking. Darius suddenly asked insinuatingly of the younger, "I would like you to visit with me." He gave the air and she the smiling and negative response that this was an old game between them, polite and charged with ancillary meaning. It was all that was said, and the mother grunting like Mother Theresa stood and left her with us. And then both women disappeared and Darius returned to his dreamlike pose. He sat erect and turned a broad back to me elbow akimbo, hand on his chin. And was joined by another indistinguishable man and another until they looked like Henry Moore statues in black robes frozen in space-time. They broke and reformed and then he explained, breaking the silent pantomime. This is how we communicate. It is all non-verbal, like a fashion model game of freeze and by sheer force of will you stare down people into positions of dominance and submission.
I was deferential as I had been all day, puzzling my way through, trying to get the gist of it all. There was only Arabic spoken but never a disparaging word, and now that more men and women were filling the square, I could begin to sense their disdain for the two of us. For although we were dark and dressed as if native in dark flowing robes as all were in this temperate amusement park, we were still strangers.
Darius emptied his pocket after more of the dramaturge and revealed chips of blue paint which upon closer inspection turned out to be gold leaf. "They have no idea", he confided. It's replaced every day. The city is fascist, the people are silent and cruel. Darius was a guest and I the guest of a guest in a police state paradise of astonishing beauty. All day and every day the populous engaged in a wordless stage play of mannerism all dressed in grays and blacks showing only their expressionless faces in hierarchical harmony.
I found a newspaper. I wanted to understand. There was a cartoon with African animals, sensuously drawn in black and white. It was the most popular cultural production. It was called King Ti, for the protagonist lion of the same name. He had a human male chest and was in most every frame telling everyone what to do, and them all agreeing. In this day's paper the lion had met his monkey and the monkey asked the lion, "Aren't you afraid of snakes?". It turned out that this was the most popular issue of the series. King Ti said "No!". The monkey asked again. "Then are you afraid of.." and was precipitously interrupted by a flash of lightning drawn in a negative reversal of black and white. The flash, like a nuclear sunrise blasting white and illuminating the skeletons of all the creatures. The panel was drawn as wide as the page of the newspaper trembling in my hand. It was the final panel and there was no reply. I tore through my stack and found no other mention, no continuation of the story. It was all that needed to be said.
My Arabic name is Raven, like a single named futbol star. I appear on the vast plazas, all beveled and pristine and I pose in my robes with the rest of the slaves. Everything is understood and nothing is said and every day the sun shines perfectly in the perfect and quiet monumental metropolis. Every night I return to the monorail studio and in the tall urn in the corner, I gather a fortune in paint flake.
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