Crossing the Line
The women’s one hundred metre
final is about to start.
From the budding colonies on Luna
and Mars to the deep-sea dwellings on Saturn’s moon Titan, the eyes of the
entire solar system are fixed on planet Earth and its state-of-the-art Olympic
stadium. Shaped like a cube, it defies gravity, suspended just above the old
skyscrapers of
Seven contenders stand on the field.
Each is a star. And like real stars, each shines with its own distinct light.
Nilo Pith in lane three, for instance, has slender legs twice as long as her
torso. She skips over land like a Sailfin Lizard does over water. Koo Haan, on
the other hand, propels herself forward on her fists, Gorilla like. She swings
impatiently on her tree trunk arms in lane five. Then there is Jem Locus, who
is often confused for a cripple. She sits squatting in lane one. Although she
cannot stand, she can—instantaneously—extend both legs. The resulting leap
through the air, covering ten metes in a single bound, has resulted her in
being dubbed, The Frog. The other ladies, Shanti Ho, The Bull, Kusi Chem, The
Gazelle, and Git Got, The Snake, are all genetically altered, super athletes.
The question appears to be a
contemporary one; are these horrible mutants or marvels of human ingenuity? The
answer, however, is ages old. It is perhaps best summarized by the adage,
beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Humanity never had consensus on matters
esthetical. This race is no different. Some stare at the spectacle in disgust,
captivated by its depravity. Others cheer, believing that what it means to be
human has nothing to do with your DNA.
Regardless of the discord in
public opinion, a parents right to alter its child’s genome, to enhance its
life chances, is enshrined in the charter of fundamental human rights. What
changes parents believe to be “life enhancing” is also—as is obvious by looking
at the athletes— open to interpretations.
These faintly human forms
impatiently await the arrival of one final contestant. Since being an altered
is as common as basic immunization used to be in the nineteenth and twentieth
century (and for much the same reasons), this eighth and final runner is a rare
human specimen. In this age of exotic shapes and enhanced physiology, she was
conceived through messy intercourse. Hairy, with wrinkles and fatty deposits in
all the wrong places, she is by all accounts, flawed. But it was precisely this
that had first brought her attention and sponsorship dollars, without which no
athlete could hope to train at the level that is required to reach the top
tiers of sport. It was her flawed nature that made her “human”.
To further add to her public
mystique, and throwing the media frenzy into over-drive, this unaltered had
“converted” (it was a conversion in name only, you see) to Islam. An ancient religion founded nearly five
thousand years ago, Islam, (and religions in general) had fallen out of vogue,
until her conversion, when mankind found itself contemplating such metaphysical
matters once again. It had also made this race about much more than who crossed
the finish line first. It is an experiment; a test of the power of religions in
general and Islam in particular.
Purity, as they call her, has
still not made her way onto the field. The crowd chants her name. Some wonder
if she has backed out of the race at the last minute. There are several
theories going around as to why she might have.
The truth is that she has not
backed out. She stands motionless in one of the dimly lit tunnels that open
onto the field where the other athletes await her arrival. In the shadows, and
wearing no clothing, she cuts a curvaceous silhouette. Her skin is fair. Her
breasts and shoulder are small, compared to the rest of her large, muscular
frame. Her well-developed thighs and hunches give her a slight pear-like shape.
Her face, aptly, has an aerodynamic, pointy nose. It complements the rest of
her sharp and angular face. Having shorn her brown curls to reduce weight and
air resistance, the light reflects softly off her clean-shaven head—like a
halo. She is in prayer. The words come to her spontaneously— the mind knows
what the body needs—and their calming effect brings her heartbeat down a notch,
as just the right amount of adrenaline courses through her veins.
“My lord, who is most powerful
and ever merciful, I run this race for you. Winning or losing mean nothing to
me. There is, however, purpose and reason in everything you do. And I believe
that today you have brought me to this threshold so that I may complete this
victory in your name. Fill my muscles with your infinite strength. Allow me to
spread your glory with each stride. Allow this insignificant and humble
servant, to be your herald on this track today. Amen.”
Her prayer is destined to come
true. But not in anyway she could even begin to imagine.
Mary, you see, is not a believer.
True, she prays five times a day and acts in every other way, to the best of
her abilities, as a Muslim. But in her heart she didn’t believe in Allah or
Islam. For her, these are just superstitions and mythologies from ages past. As
she explained on the CNN interview, she respected the religion, but really, it
was all being done in the name of sport.
Most specialists now seemed to
agree that religious and spiritual training, the kind that Mary had undertaken,
could provide serious benefit to professional athletes. Mental strength counted more and more over
the years as athletes touched the very outer limits of the physical realm, even
with genetically altered, superior bodies. Perhaps by exploring the
non-physical realm further, which might somehow yield the slightest of
advantages, one could turn evident defeat into certain victory.
Four years ago Ali, Mary’s coach,
had been the first to grasp this fact. She had lost a qualifier and hit a
career low, when he had approached her with the idea.
“Mary,” Ali had said bluntly,
“one of the Gods out there is your salvation. I want you to pick a religion and
become a follower of the faith.”
“What do you mean pick a faith? What is this about Ali?”
“Mary, physically, I believe you
ought to outperform everyone out there. Your weakness lies here,” said Ali pointing
to her head. “The meditations, the yoga and the concentration exercises are
obviously not working, or at the least, not working as well as we had hoped. We
need a more powerful and holistic approach. Pick one of those ancient myths,
maybe one of those ‘the complete way of life’ religions, and work with that.
Those will produce results — I guarantee it.”
“You’re joking right? I mean what
ever happened to sport science? And
how can a myth, do explain coach, help me perform better? “
“Okay. Suppose I give you a
pill,” Ali elucidated, “and tell you that it makes anyone who takes the pill
ten times stronger. You believe me, take the pill, and lo and behold, you
actually become ten times stronger. Do you know what has just happened Mary?”
“You’re given me biomechanical
nanoprobes to eat, knowing full well that they are prohibited under IOC rules.”
“Well yes, they could be
nanoprobes, but they don’t have to be.
The pill could still give you enormous strength, even if they were made of
nothing more than common sugar. That’s the beauty of the placebo effect.
Basically, it doesn’t really matter if what you believe is true or not, just
believing provides benefits in and of it self.
“Now, say you were to believe in
an omnipotent deity, constantly looking over your shoulder and taking a
personal interest in your life; helping you and listening to you and even
answering your prayers. If the deity actually exists—jackpot— you have the most
powerful ally imaginable on your side.
“If on the other hand, there is
no God out there, there are two possibilities. One is simply that nothing
happens; you remain just the way you are now. The second possibility, and what
is more likely I believe, is that something does happen. It would be like God
still existed, in as much as you end up reaping the benefits of the most
powerful placebo imaginable. You can’t lose, you see. It’s a win-win
situation.”
“But you just gave it all away by
telling me that it’s a placebo. For a placebo to work, you can’t know it’s a
placebo. You can’t say, here, take this placebo, it will work.”
“I said nothing of the kind.
Maybe it’s not a placebo. I don’t know— maybe there is a God. Who can say about
such matters for certain?”
“But that’s precisely the problem Ali” She
said, finally realizing that Ali was very serious, in a more serious tone, “I
have thought about God and religion—a lot. My first year at university I
devoted to this subject and you know my parents were very religious too. And in
my heart,” Ali noticed that she said heart, and not mind, “I just know God
doesn’t exist. The placebo wont work because I don’t believe it will work.”
“But you can make yourself
believe, Mary, in order to win.”
“That’s just crazy Ali. How can I
forget the conclusions of my own thinking? Dictated to me, Id like to believe,
to a very large extent from rationality and logic. How can I just ignore what
is— to me at least— the Truth.”
“Oh but you can, Mary, and you
do, all the time. When you walk onto that field before a big race, do you
believe you are the best, that you can beat everyone else standing?”
“Yes.”
“Is that the truth, logical and
rational?”
“Well, no. Not really”
“So you pretend because believing
gives you an edge?”
“Well. I suppose I do.”
“This is exactly the same thing.
A willing suspension of critical faculty for a much needed mental edge.”
Mary, eventually, had to concede
that it was possible, in some sense, to believe and yet not believe at the same
time. They decided to give it a shot. Besides, when you are at rock bottom, you
have nothing to lose. They agreed— Mary would convert.
Directly above the field, on the
ceiling of the cube stadium, among the thousands of wide-eyed faces, sits one
Mr. Josh Somner, waiting for Mary Yam to appear. He too is a convert to Islam,
making them co-religionist. But the similarities end there.
Josh is in his late-twenties with
a confusing set of features. His eyes are a Caucasian blue. His skin is brown.
His nose is flat and slightly turned up. His black hair, uncut for many months,
has grown into a large “afro” of tight curls. His parents, unsure of their own
heritage, wanted him to be an amalgam of all the varied races that had existed
in earths past.
His mannerisms are even more
uncertain. Mr. Somner has never felt particularly comfortable in his own skin.
Today he is especially ill at ease, sweating profusely, as he sits eating a
hotdog, scratching his forehead in a nervous tick. Some, who knew him well,
would have described him as a befuddled and lost soul. They would be wrong;
this was the new Josh, about to change the course of history, driven by the
conviction of his beliefs.
Josh was one of those unique
individuals who grew up, from a very young age, believing in nothing.
Standing with his father in their
rose garden one night— Josh couldn’t have been more than fifteen then— the
sight and smell of strange and wonderful orchids that had been genetically
altered filling his senses, he looked around him and then up at the stars and
asked, “Father, what does it all mean?”
“Mean? What do you mean, mean?
There is no meaning out there Josh. It’s all in your head.” It didn’t matter
that Josh’s young mind failed to grasp even an iota of his father’s philosophy.
“That is not a chair you are sitting on. It is only plastic. It is your mind
that sees ‘a chair’.” Josh’s little hands grasped the chair as though trying to
make sure it was still there. “See this rose. It is not red. The red too is
just in your mind.” He watched his father slowly pluck the petals off one by
one. “The world has no meaning as far as we know Josh, it is just matter and
energy governed by physical law.”
Josh grew up an indecisive child;
constantly changing his mind about things and easily swayed. Not surprisingly,
he had accomplished nothing of import in the twenty-five odd years of his life
(although he had done well in the sciences at school and university and was
handy at programming nano-machines) and, slowly, over the years, grew to suffer
from a nihilistic, incapacitating, almost suicidal depression. His life, he
felt, was pointless. And having wasted so much of it, he felt a sense of
desperate urgency to rectify the situation.
Although pills could have been an
easy fix for him, for some reason, or rather for none, as was the case with
most of Josh’s decisions, he refused to take them. Instead, he happened to find
in his friend’s attic the Genuflector 5000. As it said on the packaging, “the
spiritual advisor of a new era, capable of providing spiritual guidance in any
religion, with five easy steps to creating your own cult”, The Genuflector, by
the way, had been at the centre of a massive scandal and the entire line had
been recalled, its religious subroutines being found too militant.
Taking the Genuflector machine home, Josh
dusted it off, and almost overnight became a Muslim. Why had he chosen Islam?
For no reason in particular. But it was, at least, the last of Josh’s pointless
decisions. Over the weeks and months, as the Genuflector had preached to him he
began to see the internal logic and system of Islam. All you had to do was
believe in Allah, and everything simply followed from there.
Josh seemed to loose focus when
the Genuflector started explaining about the diverse schools and attitudes with
in Islam. To circumvent this, the Genuflector suggested that one could use the
basic principals of Islam, which were the same for all, to choose your own
unique path from among the rich traditions in Islam.
And having finally found his
meaning and purpose, he was also determined to change. Over the last many
months as the Mary Yam saga had unfolded, he had acted with uncharacteristic
single-mindedness. He had made a plan. Or rather, as he believed, the plan was
given to him. And now it was time to execute.
As she makes her way towards the entrance, Mary’s
life flashes before her eyes. It all led inexorably, she thought, to this
moment in time. Destiny. Unlike Josh,
for Mary, choosing Islam had been an obvious choice; she was already familiar
with its idiom. Growing up in her parents house, many years ago, she had been a
believer; both her parents practicing Muslims, although in their own, very
different ways.
She
had mostly fond memories of her house on the hill, built on the outskirts of
the city that it over looked.
Her father, she grew to understand,
loved the Prophet of Islam so dearly, that his aim in life was to recreate, as
best he could, the time and space the Prophet had occupied during his own life
(this also explained her appearance). This meant transplanting the customs and
practices of the camel driven deserts of
Her mother was on the other
extreme, living in the ultra modern side of the house. She was a hefty woman
and never hid the soft folds of her skin under any kind of clothing. She never
owned a wardrobe. She enjoyed, however, all the other bounties the Lord had
given her, eating and drinking her fill, reclining on the ottoman has Jeeves
pampered her. The walls in this section of the house were transparent and she would
sit like a princess in a harem, overlooking the metropolis.
She owned a butler robot. Jeeves,
as she liked to call it, was at her beck and call, and was an expert cook. Not
only would Jeeves serve her exotic treats for her taste buds, but also
concocted specially tailored designer drugs and mind altering potions. She had
no hesitation using “artificial” means that the high-tech age put at her
disposal to tickle her “happiness neurons”.
She spent days cross-legged, in
drug-induced traces, during which the rosary never stopped flicking through her
fingers. What happened during the trance, only she knew. But it was an intense
experience, Mary knew, for she had walked into her room many times when she had
been under the influence. Her eyes would be wide open, the pupils dilated till
they were about to pop out of their sockets, as she chanted ancient Arabic
texts, louder and louder. She looked perfectly horrified, although maintained
to Mary that she was not scared during the trances but perfectly calm and
happy.
Slowly, as the chemicals left her
system, she would start talking again. Mary remembered her saying things like,
“Regardless of faith and beliefs, we are all Muslims. Islam had never been so
well practiced by so many, since perhaps the time of the Prophet himself.” Her
reasoning was that atheism, which had steadily grown to become the norm in
society, was the truest testament to the mystery and utter incomprehensibility
of the infinite being that was Allah.
Caught between these two
opposites, any other child might well have been torn to bits by such parent.
Mary however managed to piece together, taking something from each parent, a
semblance of her own system of beliefs. But what really made this possible was
the fact that Mary had shown, at age five, a propensity for running, and had
started her training. (She had started early; the average age of those who went
into professional sport was around nine.) This meant that she had another focus
in her life and could not, until much later, analyze such matter too closely.
She was a Muslim, and that was that.
That is, till the day a Police
sergeant stopped her outside the entrance of her house. She was not allowed
inside. A murder had been committed. And the murderer had then taken his own
life. As the medics tried to bundle her off to a relatives house and the
forensics and other officials moved about at the crime scene, she caught a
glimpse through a closing door of something she was never meant to see. The
image was instantly etched with some sharp object into her mind, forever.
Her mother lay face up on the
bed, with two large fleshy openings in her chest where her breast would usually
hang. Smoke rose up from inside and around these two apertures and Mary suddenly
realized that the aroma she smelt was that of her own mothers burnt flesh. The
expression on her mothers wide eyed face reminded her of what she would look
like under her trances and this would, strangely, comfort her.
Between her legs lay the mangled,
twisted and melted body of Jeeves the robot butler.
Her father lay on the floor next
to the bed. One side of his chard skull had disintegrated from what must have
been a plasma blast. His long hair completely singed, she could see his skull—
half of it— as he lay face down. One hand still clawed the weapon that had
dealt out so much destruction.
It was enough for her to have
seen this. She did not need to understand what took place. She did not need to
assign blame. Her relations did. Later on in life, after she met Ali and a new
life in the world of athletics, when she finally put some distance between
herself and her relatives, their quarrelling would remind her of what went on,
many centuries ago, about the many interpretation of the ancient script of the
Quran, Islam’s holy book.
A robot is not a person, her mother’s sister had said, and Jeeves was nothing more than a
high-tech dildo. Your mother, who
reveled in the bounties of the Lord, was indulging in nothing more than
masturbation. And who can blame her—your father was always too busy rubbing his
forehead on prayer mat. And for that he killed her. That sick fundamentalist
bastard!
The other side, her fathers
brother, had their own version, their own interpretation.
It had been going on for years Mary, that sick love affair
with Jeeves.
Your father, that poor man, kept quiet
about it for as long as he could. Don’t you see Mary? That perverted woman
drove him to it. He had no choice.
After
all the tears had dried, and after all the nights of contemplation and reading
and searching for answers, about what she had taken for granted before, all she
was left with was an emptiness; a longing for a parents love, she would never
know again.
She concluded that it made no
sense. Religion, Allah, life and death— all of it— made no sense.
Unlikely as it might sound,
becoming an atheist had not been an emotional decision in her mind. She
believed it to be based on the cool reasoning of what the philosophers of old
had called “the problem of evil”. Why does a beneficent, omnipotent and
all-knowing God allow senseless evil, pain and cruelty to exist in this world?
Unable to come to terms with this fact, she had literally sprinted away from
Islam and her parents home, for a university education.
She continued her training as a
short distance runner once there, having recently won silver at the under
eighteen World Athletic Championships. The hero of the university track team,
she developed a crush on the middle-aged coach with a toothy smile and a black
mop of hair, Ali. Together they had made their way to the Olympics. Last time
round, fresh out of university, four years ago, she had lost in the qualifying
rounds.
Then Ali had convinced her to
return to Islam. Never taken to attempting anything half-heartedly, she immersed
herself in her old religion with the discipline of a world-class athlete. Ali
hired the great French spiritualist Remy for her proper guidance. The grueling
physical training continued as usual, side-by-side with the new, religious one.
After twelve months, however, she felt as though it was all a waste of her
time, but she did it anyway; waking up everyday at the crack of dawn, saying
her prayers five times a day and reciting the Quran constantly; fasting all
month in Ramadan and even making plans for a hajj, she felt as though she was
just going through the motions of what is a very involving religion with many
necessary rituals. At least in Remy’s version it was.
The charade came to an abrupt end
when Ali handed her his resignation after she lost another race. Mary hadn’t
expected it at all. It had hit her like a body blow. As the air left lungs she
breathed a weak, “Why?”
“I
don’t want to waste my time with someone who has no chance of winning,” he
said. “I’m sorry Mary, but you’re never going to win. I was hoping our little
experiment in Islam would give you the advantage you need, but clearly, it’s
not working. Maybe there is no Allah, or the placebo effect is too weak to help
you. Who knows? But I’m afraid I’m going to invest my efforts somewhere else,
somewhere where they will bear some fruit.”
“Ali,”
she wept, “you can’t leave me. I’ll do anything.”
“I’m
sorry Mary but like you yourself said, you don’t believe. Nobody or nothing can
change that. I see that now.”
“Please
Ali, let me give it another shot. Ill do a better job of it this time. I
promise
Ali
stayed on the condition that she would open her heart to Allah.
That night, as soon as she put
her head on the prayer mat, one word rose up from her subconscious reflexively,
like dry heaves and the retching of the stomach as it spews out toxins, and
repeated itself in her mind as she wept inconsolably.
Why?
It was the why of her parent’s
death that she had never asked of Allah. The intensity of her longing, the comfort
that He provided, shocked her, even as she wept. That night and from that day
forward, she spoke to Him as she had done as a child.
The
experiment was well on its way.
Psychologists had discovered
centuries ago that many fully formed personalities could inhabit a single human
brain. They called it schizophrenia.
Similarly, it appeared that Mary,
over four years of training took on another personality, one of a truly
believing Muslim girl, while her unbelieving self was pushed back into the
deeper recesses of her mind. Both personalities, however, continued to exist
inside her, making it impossible for perhaps even Allah to say what she was—
Muslim or non-Muslim— leave alone the news media and its pundits, which
pontificated on the matter endlessly.
Now, as she walks in the wing
towards the field, just outside the walls of the giant hovering cube, her heart
and mind resting peacefully in the hands of the Almighty after the calming
effect of her prayer, she is reminded of the other cube that lies in
“Runners to the starting line,”
came the announcement.
She takes a deep breath and
starts making her way into the light.
Josh had thought that the hardest
part of his plan would be finding the right kind of weapon; getting any kind of
metallic object past security would be impossible. After the “terror threats”
of the twentieth century, anything even resembling a weapon was not allowed
near the Olympic village.
There was only one way, he realized,
to fulfill his mission. How absurd it is, he thought, that what yesterday
seemed crazy and senseless, seemed today to be only rational and logical. Once
you accept the premises, the conclusions are obvious.
It would have to be a suicide
mission. Although the term had been used before, Josh chuckled to himself as he
realized that his plan gave “using ones body as a lethal weapon” a whole new
meaning.
As it turned out, crafting the
right weapon had been the easy part; it was there with him now, waiting to be
put into action. The hard part had been getting the seat he was sitting on,
since every event that Mary was scheduled to attend was sold out months in
advance. So he had hung around outside, getting to know the scalpers. He had
found a ticket for the semi-final but it wasn’t for the ceiling seating of the
cube. He simply had to be on the ceiling.
Finally, today, as he approached
the line-up levitating into the stadium, he found a pregnant man making his way
out, who’s water had just broke and Josh found himself making his way up to the
stadium as one Wing Lee. Sitting in his seat, upside down on the ceiling, with
gravity still pulling him into his seat, he couldn’t believe he was finally
here. It was more than the culmination of the past many months; it would be the
culmination of his life. Nothing stood in his way. One final act remained.
Sitting in his seat, waiting for
Mary to appear on the field, Josh’s mouth goes dry. He searches of the sweet
that is in one of his pockets. Just then, the arena erupts into applaud, as
Mary Yam finally makes her entrance. The noise does not distract her in the
slightest. She simply raises her arm and points upwards. To Him belong all praise and glory. Then, slightly embraced, she
realizes that nobody can see her hand and brings it down. Taking her place in
lane four, she is the most alert and simultaneously, calmest of the runners.
Islam, it would appear, has given her the edge.
The crowd, in the meanwhile, has
stopped dead in mid cheer. Josh too sits frozen with one hand in his breast
pocket. A collective gasp of disbelief emanates from the crowd, which then
falls silent. People stood dumbstruck and turned to each other.
What’s happened to Mary? Her body looks like its covered in
blisters.
Mary’s
body was totally indistinguishable under what could only be described, by the
uninitiated, as a carpeting of sores and pustules. Only her face remained
untouched.
Immediately, rumors began to fly
and a loud whisper spread across the arena. The
Islamists, who think she’s desecrating their religion by pretending to be
something she is not, have poisoned her.
Nonsense! Her actions
make her the best of Muslims. It is the enemies of Islam, who don’t want her to
win and bring glory to Allah who have set the plague on her.
Not so. Clearly, this
is Allah Himself, striking and afflicting her with this horrendous disease for
using religion in such an odious manner
“Your
attention please,” chimed a voice in the entire stadium. It repeating its
message several time and put the conjecture to rest, “Mary Yam is using a
personal cloaking device, deemed legal under IOC rules.”
The
crowd took their seats, understanding that the cloaking device pixilated the
light coming off her body. It covered her with tiny squares that censored
television screens in earlier times, now mistaken as some kind of rash. Most
even understood correctly why she was under the cloaking device, which spoke
volumes about how closely her story was followed. Obviously, it’s because of Islam.
She
had discussed her predicament with Ali a few days before the race. It had been
a strange discussion, to say the least. Ali seemed to play along. Somehow,
somewhere along the line, the means had become the end.
“I
cannot believe you are thinking about this in such narrow terms,” argued Ali,
“Muslim women have run naked before. Its not like you are the first one to do
it. ”
“Just
because it was right for them, does not make it so for me. I have to think for
myself. And I think it crosses a line that Allah does not want us to cross.”
“God
cares not what you wear,” Ali chided, “He sees only what is in your heart.
Actions are judged by intentions, remember.”
“Of
course I am not doing this to flaunt myself Ali but I am responsible for the
repercussions of my actions. By going out there naked am I not adding to the
problems that already plague our society?”
“Like
what?”
“The
constant bombardment and flaunting of sexuality, the objectification of women
as sex objects rather than being respected as mothers, wives and sisters. We women
must protect our own modesty, instead of dressing to arouse and then
complaining when we get treated like meat. That is why modesty and humility are
favorable in His eyes, are they not? What kind of a message am I sending out to
the world? I’m sorry Ali; it feels like I’m selling out my beliefs for a shot
at a medal.”
She paused and looked at Ali, who
was still unconvinced. He was doubtful of her newfound inclinations towards
modesty. After all, she had run all the other races naked. He knew her well
enough to know that the real reason was something else altogether.
She didn’t want to bring up the dream. It made
her uncomfortable, so much so that her palms would sweat profusely just
thinking about it. But she realized that Ali was not going to be swayed
otherwise.
“Besides,” she continued, “I told
you about my dream. Remy, the man who knows more about Islam than anyone else,
the man you hired for me, says that dreams are His signs. I ran naked and my
head exploded, Ali, I think that was
a sign.”
In her dream, she is trapped
inside the Ka’ba. Snakes slither at her heels. Frogs leap into the air.
Lizards, gazelles and gorillas are running amuck. She is scared. She feels the
four walls closing in on her. She wants out. She runs faster, headed for the
exit. The animals, and the noise, fall behind. She looks down and sees that she
is totally naked. She keeps running. Then, she sees the end coming. She sees
her own face. It explodes. Her headless body falls limply to the ground.
(Ali had thought that it was the repressed
memory of her parents death coming through in her dreams— her father had shot
himself in the head, hadn’t he? And her mother was a nudist wasn’t she? He
didn’t say anything of the sort to Mary though.)
It had been so vivid and totally
different in its nature from her usual dreams, that Mary had come to believe
that this dream was in fact a direct communication from Allah. For many days
and nights she trembled in fear and felt certain that the dream was a prophecy.
(Each animal represented one athlete. The Ka’ba represented the cube arena.
This much was obvious. What she did not consider too closely was how she felt
trapped inside the Ka’ba and wanted out.)
But how could she simply back out
of the race, the final no less, because of a dream? She fought the fears in her
heart by demanding a cloaking device to develop an asymmetry between the dream
and the reality, the issue of modesty as much a smoke-screen for her own
duplicitous mind as for everyone else. Desperate to regain her mental balance,
with only hours before the race, she ended up telling herself, in a soft
whisper, just once, that Allah did not really exist and that she was taking her
training far too seriously. She had to run this race.
The dream, if she contemplated
it, put a spotlight on the undeniable schism lurking just beneath her well
disciplined, believing thoughts. It risked making the entire experiment
redundant. Ali understood this and quickly resolved the issue by agreeing to the
use of the cloaking device.
But
she is not thinking about the dream now.
The cloak protecting her modesty and her imagination from going wild,
Mary readies herself in the starting blocks.
The
crowd goes completely silent in anticipation.
Josh has found the sweet from his
pocket, in the meanwhile, along with a neatly folded piece of paper. As he
sucks on the candy his mind is in frenzy. Should
I kill her or not? Mary’s apparent act of modesty has set Josh thinking
again.
He
grows angry with himself and thinks that the old Josh, the indecisive,
purposeless Josh has returned. To gain strength, he thought of his spiritual
advisor, the Genuflector 5000, his guru and guide.
Sitting with it one day, after he
had converted, he had watched the media coverage of Mary, and her so-called
conversion to Islam. Outraged and over flowing with the zeal of the newly
converted, he had queried the Genuflector, “History. Imposters of Islam.”
The
Genuflector had spewed out data. It first related a story from Muhammad’s time,
around the seventh century A.D., of the capture and execution of one infidel
during battle. The infidel, who knew certain death awaited him after his
capture, quickly recited the Kalama, the Muslim oath of allegiance, and
technically had converted to Islam. His captor, a follower of Muhammad, had
nonetheless executed him since it was obvious that the man did not convert in
his heart and had done so only to save his life. Muhammad, when told, was
unhappy with what had happened and reprimanded the man, saying that nobody had
the right to kill the man once he had said the Kalama. One cannot presume what
is in someone’s heart, only Allah being privy to that information, being the
moral of the story.
Josh
disregarded this tale. It didn’t apply, in his opinion, since Mary Yam freely
admitted on CNN that she didn’t believe. It was all in the name of sport and
trying to achieve what was the placebo effect of religious belief. Everyone
knew what was in her heart.
The
story he had paid great attention to took place thirteen hundred years after
Muhammad’s time, set in a place called Pakistan and concerned not just one
individual pretending to be a Muslim, but an entire community. (Similar events
were repeated in other states, like Bangladesh, but Pakistan remained the best
example). Some would argue after today’s events and the investigation that
following that what happened in Pakistan had nothing to do with Islam. Islam is
not what the Muslims do, but rather what Allah says you ought to do. The
Genuflector, on the other hand, being simple minded, considered the complicity
of the 150 million Muslims of Pakistan (and undoubtedly many more who held the
same beliefs around the world), to have certainly made this a part of the
Islam’s heritage.
The
Genuflector explained what had been termed, at the time, as the Coco-Cola
judgment.
“In A.D. 1983 the Supreme Court
of Pakistan ruled that the title of Muslim and other such terminology used by
Muslims as part of there Islamic identity, was akin to a trademark. Like the trademark
name Coco-Cola, a popular beverage at the time, explicitly mentioned in the
ruling, was the rightful property of the company Coco-Cola, so was the word
Muslim. Nobody else was allowed to label themselves as Muslim, when in fact
they were not Muslims, just like some other beverage maker was not allowed to
label their drink Coco-Cola.
“Even sentences like the Kalama
and the Azan, which is the Islamic call to prayer, among others things, were
under Islamic copyright protection, so to speak. The Coco-Cola judgment made
their use by people pretending to be Muslims, illegal and punishable by
imprisonment.
“Thousands of Ahmadi’s, a small
religious sect that insisted they were Muslims too, but diverged in one, and
only one, crucial aspects in their beliefs from the Sunni majority were
officially declared non-Muslim based on this ruling. They used the same Kalama,
the same prayers, and even called themselves, Muslims. But these became, after
the ruling, only copyright infringements. Many were hunted down and killed, or
spent years in legal incarceration for these infringements and generally
pretending to be Muslims.”
“What
do you think about this Coca Cola judgment, Genuflector?”
“There
is wisdom in the Coca Cola ruling, Josh, in my humble opinion. Who or what is a
Muslim? Is it in the doing or in the thinking or both? This question must be
asked and answered by a believer. If this defining line is not drawn, as some
liberals suggest, then you yourself, as a Muslim, cease to exist. The self only
has meaning in relation to what is not the self. If there is no such thing as a
non-Muslim, then there is no such thing as a Muslim either. There is no light
if there is no darkness.
“Sectarianism, the separation of
what is identified as oneself from what is not
the self, is an unavoidable outcome of this necessity, from which all religions
suffered at one time or another. The Ahmadi’s, by most standards, were
non-Muslims in their beliefs. The wrath of true Muslims on these imposters was,
in my humble opinion, Josh, divine justice. Allah gives you the right to
protect your own identity from those that corrupt it with pretence.”
This, Josh concluded, was exactly what Mary
Yam was doing; corrupting his newfound Muslim identity with pretence. Bitch! She deserved to be punished like
those wretched Ahmadi’s.
The acts of his Muslim brethren
of long ago moved him. He even remembered the last extraneous remark the
Genuflector had made on the issue. “On a side note, Josh, I must confess my
bafflement about why all other kinds of copyright infringements and general
lawlessness continued unabated in Pakistan, while this particular offense was
given the emphasis it rightly deserved.”
Josh begins to regain his
courage. And time is beginning to run out. The chocolate candy has almost
completely melted in his mouth. He
slowly unfolds the piece of paper he had found along with the candy. He
realizes what it is. He did not mean to bring it with him, obviously. But here
it was, urging him on. A sign from Him,
he thought. The piece of yellow paper contained his angry scribbles in bright
red ink and read:
WHY I SHOULD KILL MARY YAM
1.
1. She is using Islam for personal
gain and doesn’t believe, showing utter disrespect
2.
2. She is setting an example, very
publicly, which says, its okay to do 1
3.
3. If she comes close to winning the
race, her methods would become popular and make a joke of the practice of Islam
in the entire solar system
4.
4. She is by her own admission a
non-Muslim, an imposter
5.
5. By historical precedent, an
individual pretending to be a Muslim may be killed
6.
6. Her death defines my life,
darkness defines light
7.
7. Finally, and most importantly, if
such a liar and cheat is allowed to win, the implication that Allah truly does
not exist, that we all suffer from some placebo effect, would be unbearable
After reading it he crushes the
paper into a ball, as though he had sucked out all the energy it contained, and
lets it drop from his hand.
Now, Josh moves purposefully. He
bends over in his seat pretending to adjust the snugness of his right shoe
while actually ripping out the electronic chip that controls this function,
from the side. The shoe deflates completely and falls to the ground. Josh sits
up in his seat, the small chip in his palm. A food tray covers his movements as
he slowly pulls his trousers down and jams the square metal and silicone
device, which he has modified, into his body, just beneath the scrotum. Its
sharp metallic edges have to make contact with nerve endings and blood vessels.
He winces in pain as the chip triggers the biomechanical nanoprobes— which he
ate with his breakfast that morning— into action. An intense pain shoots up
into his stomach and intestines from the chip. Then a slow burning acid seems
to trickle its way down into his bladder. He knows it is the nano-machines
arriving, after what felt like an eternity, into his penis, which begins to
burn as though dipped in smoldering lead and grows grotesquely erect and long.
The tiny machines are stretching and modifying his skin into an unnaturally
hard tube, resembling the barrel of a gun. The muscles that usually have only
sufficient strength to propel semen a few yards during ejaculation are
strengthened fifty fold. Finally, the few milligrams of sperm his gonads have
naturally produced are clumped together and converted into small, hard, silvery
corpuscles. The weapon is assembled and ready in under a minute.
It has only one shortcoming, (no
pun intended). When erect and ready to fire, it can only point in the general
upward direction, away from his body. Sitting on any of the four sides of the
cube, he could only have aimed at the ceiling. Only by sitting on the ceiling
itself, looking up at the field below, could his weapon have had a clear shot
at the target.
Perhaps the only suspicious piece
of weaponry that he is carrying is a pair of sunglasses, with a heads up
display built into them. To watch T.V.
he had told the guard at the gate. He now slips them out of his pocket and puts
them on. The display is connected to the nanoprobes and instead of T.V. they
display only a marksman’s crosshairs, which follow his retinal movement. They
fall directly over the object his eyes are focused on—Mary.
Meanwhile, the athletes on the
field, after they have been introduced lane by lane, followed by much cheering,
put one knee and both hands on the ground and lodge their feet into the
starting blocks. “On you mark!” The athletes thrust their behinds into the air,
and a second later the starting gun fires. The race is on.
Mary
pushes off the starting blocks in long leaping strides, almost gazelle like,
building momentum. She has not been the quickest out of the blocks. At the
twenty-metre mark she is in fourth place.
From the naked eye of course,
they all appear to be neck and neck, running in a perfectly straight line, and
usually would remain so till the finish line. But the computers gave the
positions in real time and could evaluate to an incredibly small interval of
both distance and time.
Josh
realizes he has to aim for a head shot, Mary’s body being a pixilated blur.
Focusing between her eyes, he blinks in a deliberate fashion, causing his
sunglasses to zoom in on the target. Instead of pulling the trigger, doubts
fill his heart once again after seeing her face up close. He starts to panic.
Was he still that same spineless Josh?
His chest heaving to gain its
breath, hyperventilating, he uses a visualization technique to give himself
strength and sees in his minds eye, the list he made of all the reasons for
which Mary deserved death. Even though there is no time to go through it item
by item, he wishes he hadn’t thrown away the piece of paper. Now, he feels, he
needs another sign from Allah.
At the halfway mark, Mary hits her
stride. She cruises past the woman in lane one, who is in third, and then
inches past the second place runner in the outer most lane. She is gaining on
the runner in first place, in lane five next to her. Her stride has shortened
but the pace has quickened considerably; her legs are a blur.
Mary’s mind is with Him. She
feels the wind against her face and a peaceful silence fills her ears.
Like the concert pianist who
contemplates not, each single keystroke of the virtuoso performance, but rather
allows the music to flow freely and unfettered by conscious, deliberate
thought, Mary lets Allah do with her as He pleases.
She submits to Him, just as she
powers into first place.
From the sidelines, Ali pumps his
fist. The placebo is working.
Josh realizes that Mary is going
to win. His forefinger hovers over his navel, the trigger of the biological
rifle that has been shaped out of his reproductive organs. But he is still—
even at this last split-second—racked with doubt and uncertainty.
Then, with ten metres to go— the
finishing line, the long white thread stretching across the lanes clearly
visible to Mary, only a few desperate steps away—the cloaking device
malfunctions. The crowd gasps. Mary’s striding nakedness is revealed to all.
Josh, in that instant,
understands, and thrusts his right forefinger deep inside his navel. The Lord has revealed that evil-does,
literally. His penis explodes in a volley of diamond hard pellets, the
recoil ripping his entire mid-section from his genitals. The sperm-bullets “fall”
down from the ceiling, slowing against the ceilings gravitational pull. Then,
as the gravitational field switches, they accelerate towards the ground and
Mary’s face.
Mary, still in a state of
submission, realizes that the cloak is no longer covering her, that her
prophetic dream has indeed come true, regardless of everything she had done to
stop it from coming into realization. Her prayer, which she had said before the
race, has also come true; she acted as His herald, not for anyone else, but for
herself. Just before the missiles strike, she smiles, having found Him, truly,
at last, if only for a split second.
Literally and metaphorically, she
knows hers is not to cross the line. She is happy to have breathed her last
inside the cube.