Lucius Shepard - All the Perfumes of Araby

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Lucius Shepard

All the Perfumes of Araby

1992

For nearly two years after my arrival in Egypt, I put off visiting the Pyramids. I had seen

them once, briefly at sunset, while en route by car from Alexandria to Cairo. Looming up

from the lion-coloured sands, their sunstruck sides ignited to a shimmering orange, as if the

original limestone veneer had been magically restored, and the shadows in their lee showed

a deep mysterious blue, almost purple, like the blood of Caesar’s Rome. They diminished

me, those ancient tombs. Too much beauty for my deracinated spirit, too much grandeur

and immensity. They made me think of history, death, and folly. I had no wish to endure the

bout of self-examination a longer visit might provoke. It would be best, I thought, to live a

hard, modern life in that city of monuments, free of ponderous considerations and

intellectual witness. But eventually curiosity got the best of me, and one afternoon I travelled

out to Giza. This time, swarmed by tourists, displayed beneath an oppressive grey sky, it

was the Pyramids that looked diminished: dull brown heaps like the spoor of a huge,

strangely regular beast.

I wandered about for more than an hour. I regarded the faceless mystery of the

Sphinx and managed to avoid having a video taken atop a camel by a ragged teenager with

an old camcorder and the raw scar of an AIDS inoculation on his bicep. At length I leaned

up against my Land Rover and smoked a hand-rolled cigarette salted with hashish and

opium flakes. I thought in pictures, my eyes closed, imagining ibis gods and golden sun

boats. When a woman’s voice with more than a touch of Southern accent spoke from

nearby, saying, ‘You can smell that shit fifty feet away,’ I was so distanced I felt only mild

resentment for this interference in the plotlessness of my life, and said, because it required

little energy, ‘Thanks.’

She was tall and slender and brown, with a slightly horsey face and generous features

and a pronounced overbite, the sort of tomboyish look I’d always found attractive, though

overall she was a bit sinewy for my tastes. Late twenties, I’d say. About my age. Her skin,

roughened by the sun, was just starting to crack into crow’s-feet, her cheekbones were

sharply whittled, and her honey-brown hair, tied back with a bandanna, was streaked

blonde and brittle at the ends. She had on chino shorts and a white T-shirt and was carrying

a net bag that held a canteen, a passport wallet, and some oranges.

‘Aren’t you goin’ to put it out?’ She gestured at my cigarette.

‘Guess I better,’ I said, and grinned at her as I ground out the butt, expecting her to

leave now that her prim mission had been accomplished; but she remained standing there,

squinting at me.

‘You’re that smuggler guy, right?’ she said. ‘Shears.’

‘Shields. Danny Shields.’ I was not alarmed that she knew my business—many

did—but I was annoyed at not being able to recall her. She had nice eyes, dark brown,

almost oriental-shaped. Her legs were long, lean and well defined, but very feminine.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember your name.’

‘Kate Corsaro,’ she said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘We’ve never met. Just

somebody pointed you out to me in a night club. They told me you were a smuggler.’ She

left a pause. ‘I thought you looked interestin’.’

‘First impressions,’ I said. ‘You can never trust ’em.’

‘Oh, I don’t know ’bout that.’ She gazed off toward the Great Pyramid; then, after a

second or two: ‘So what do you smuggle? Drugs?’

‘Too dangerous. You run drugs, you’re looking at the death penalty. I have

something of a moral problem with it, too.’

‘Is that right?’ She glanced down at the remains of my cigarette.

‘Just because I use doesn’t mean I approve of the business.’

‘Seems to me that’s tacit approval.’

‘Maybe so, but I see a distinction. Whatever else pays, I’ll deal with it. Diamonds,

exotic software, hacksaw blades… whatever. But no drugs.’

‘Hacksaw blades?’ She laughed. ‘Can’t be much profit in that.’

‘You might be surprised.’

‘Been a while since anything’s surprised me,’ she said.

A silence stretched between us, vibrant as a plucked wire. I wanted to touch the soft

packs of muscle that bunched at the corners of her mouth. ‘You’ve come to the right

place,’ I said. ‘I’m surprised all the time here.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Like now,’ I said. ‘Like this very minute, I’m surprised.’

‘This here?’ she said. ‘This is just doin’ what comes naturally.’

Despite her flirtatious tone, I had an idea she was getting bored. To hold her interest

I told stories about my Arab partner in the old bazaar, about moving robotic elements and

tractor parts. It’s odd, how when you come on to someone, even with the sort of half-assed

move I was making, you invest the proceedings with unwarranted emotion, you imbue every

action and thought with luminous possibility, until suddenly all the playful motives you had

for making the move begin to grow legitimate and powerful. It is as if a little engine has been

switched on in your heart due to some critical level of heat having been reached. It seems

that random and impersonal, that careless. Not that I was falling in love with her. It was just

that everything was becoming urgent, edgy. But soon I began to bore myself with my own

glibness, and I asked Kate how she had ended up in Egypt.

‘I was in the Middle East nine years ago. I had an itch to see it again.’

‘In Egypt?’

‘Naw, I was in Saudi. But I didn’t want to go back. I couldn’t walk around free like

here.’ I was just putting those two facts together, 1990 and Saudi Arabia, when the sun

came out full, and something glinted on the back of her right hand: three triangular diamond

chips embedded in the flesh. I noticed a slight difference in colouration between the wrist

and forearm, and realized it was a prosthesis. I had seen similar ones, the same pattern of

diamond chips, all embedded in artificial limbs belonging to veterans of Desert Storm. Kate

caught me staring at the hand, shifted it behind her hip; but a second later she moved it back

into plain view.

‘Somethin’ botherin’ you?’ she asked flatly.

‘Not at all,’ I said.

She held my eyes for a few beats. The tension in her face dissolved. ‘It bothers

some,’ she said, flexing the fingers of the hand, watching them work. She glanced up at me

again. ‘I flew a chopper, case you’re wonderin’.’

I made a noncommittal noise. ‘Must have been tough.’

‘Yeah, maybe, I don’t know. Basically what happened was just plain stupid.’ She

lapsed into another silence, and I grew concerned again that I might be losing her interest.

‘Would you like to go somewhere?’ I asked. ‘Maybe have a drink?’

She worried her lower lip. ‘A drink’s not all we’re talkin’ about here, is it?’

I was pleased by her frankness, her desire to move things along. Like her ungilded

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