The Command

The man who’d called himself Malik in Iran, Rafiq in Buenos Aires, and other names in many other places, sat under fluttering blue canvas awnings in the Marina Corniche, looking over the sun-gleaming gulf and eating fresh strawberries and frozen TCBY yogurt with a plastic spoon. His thinning hair ruffled in the hot wind. His narrowed gaze, watching the pedestrians promenading past, laughing and chattering and playing music on cassette decks, seemed to see everything and yet nothing at all.

The Sudanese passport tucked into the breast pocket of the cream linen sport jacket showed him without the plastic-rimmed glasses he’d worn in Mashhad, without the beard, with only a carefully trimmed mustache. With his high narrow forehead and prominent nose he looked a little like Anwar Sadat. The name in that passport was Doctor Fasil Tariq al-Ulam. He wore light slacks and a yellow shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, and pens in a pocket protector. A gold-toned Casio calculator-watch. A wedding ring. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray. He’d spent the afternoon strolling the waterfront. Coffee at the Phoenicia. The hourly show at Dolphin Park. Another coffee at the Marina Club, where he’d struck up a conversation with one of the boat owners, and spent twenty minutes examining a chart of the harbor before taking the table in the café.

The chill sweetness numbed the roof of his mouth. How did they get fresh strawberries here, he wondered. Fly them in?

He looked out over the beach and felt the hot wind like the breath of the Devil. Heard the flutter of canvas. Smelled a tang of wood smoke.

With that smell another beach floated up in memory. Far away, and long ago, but he’d never forgotten. Who could forget something like that? He could not.

He could not.

He could not.

He’d taken a job with the Vietnamese. That summer that seemed to him now the longest season of his existence, heavy, dirty, dangerous work far out on the Gulf of Mexico. Himself young, eager, friendly, someone people liked. A good guy, the Americans said. The shimmering water, the heat, had not been unlike the sea on which he looked out now.

Then, he’d admired America. He smiled bitterly to himself.

Three semesters a year learning the engineering he’d make his life’s work. The teachers spoke English too swiftly to understand. But the books were patient. And yes, the West was attractive. There’d been alcohol. And blond Southern girls, with their soft speech and flirtatious ways. They said he was dreamy. They called him Omar. He met them at bars. A few drinks, then back to his apartment.

Closing his eyes he recreated the tangle of sun-browned limbs, the fine golden hairs inside the parted thighs of blond cheerleaders who called him darlin’. Slipping white panties from the tanned hard bodies of tennis players. They passed notes to him in class saying they wanted to stroke his fancy. Or pressed their breasts against his back in the library, when he was trying to study. They fucked without shame, eyes blue as ice staring into his. Later he saw them with other men, and they met his reproachful stare with amusement at his anger. At Star Trek cons he slept with Romulans, Vulcans, Klingons, Kohms. With Commander Uhura, her high boots tumbled on the floor as he violated the Prime Directive again and again.

But that summer his hands calloused and his fingernails broke, and he picked up shrimper’s Vietnamese and learned how to keep engines and winches, injection jets and coolant pumps running when there weren’t any parts to fix them with.

That August the Hônh Phúc threw a wheel and another boat towed them in to Cameron, on the pass to Lake Calcasieu. He’d gone ashore to get away from the stink of shrimp and diesel fuel, and walked till the sea left his legs. By then he was far out on the beach. He stopped at a bar. Then it was night, and he heard the music, and followed it out into the wind and the sand grated under his sandals and he walked down between the dunes to where the surf roared glimmering in the moon.

On another beach decades later, he closed his eyes again. Listening to a truck going by behind him, on the wide smooth highway that bordered the Gulf where the emir held sway.

He must have heard it then, too, but mingled with the surf his ear could not distinguish that deep-throated throb, huge pistons firing up and down in the brutal syncopation of tribal drums. Because walking down out of the dunes he’d found a dozen men gathered around a fire.

They must have thrown gasoline on it, to get it blazing so high in such a short time. The flames streamed up from huge crooked logs of bleached driftwood. Jagged scars showed where they’d been dragged across the sand.