Abstract

Omar is in the bathroom, ravenous. 4 AM. He stares into the mirror. It is later, he's in his own flat, it's Monday night, or, if you prefer, Tuesday morning. Has he, Omar wonders,  lost weight?

Omar is a large man, a tall man. His big frame, mangled for twenty years, has filled out, like enforced concrete, poured around his bones in some phantom cast, a cast from some alternate realm, quite distinct from any existence he's known, separate from human memory or imagination, a cast not even to be found in the hopes or dreams of his mother. There is not a trace left of the gangly youth, the long cardboard limbs of the man who slept folded into doorways. Omar is solid, recast, he thinks, astonished, in the eyes of God. 

If anything, he approaches the toddler he once was, that chubby, solid little act of will. It's true. Omar is chubby. His flesh abounds, it sits on him seemingly without effort or care. Virtuoso flesh. Unaccountable, he thinks. An act of grace.

He is heavy. Astoundingly so. A man of gravitas. His hair has grown. He's handsome. This is so ridiculous it makes him giddy.

He thinks of his girlfriend. Nouche. His whispy, feathery girlfriend. Through an opposite act, she is barely more than the sum of her bones, an extracted version of herself, an abstract: heady, willful, like perfume. 

He is erect at the thought. And hungry. It is time for Suhar, the last meal before dawn, before today's fast, this holy month of Ramadan. He has eight minutes. There will be, Omar thinks, no lust, no anger, no food today. No stealing, he muses, no dealing, no robbing or cheating. No gear, he counts off, with relief, no crack, no smoking or drinking. Another day, another handful of negatives. Verily, he sighs, there's a blessing in that.

He looks down at his cock. It, too, is recast. It is nothing he can remember. It scares him. Godzilla's alive, with a passion wholly alien to him. He is now a passionate man, a man of the senses. A handsome man with a passion. It makes no sense.

He remembers trying to wank, for hours, unsuccessfully, with the crackling pages of crack house porn. Remembers, if anything, the sound of snapping syringes as someone would shuffle past behind him in the dark, in the cold, in someone else's no heat, no light flat. He remembers willing up desire for women he felt no desire for, remembers being held up solely by violence, by women splayed for his convenience, their abjection splinting his erection, spouting his ejection; snot and bile. Disgust.

If he has memories of shagging at all, it is not of women he's been with. He remembers willing them to sleep, their nervous little breaths beside him filling him with murderous despair. He remembers, vaguely, shagging other people's girlfriends, their hard, unattractive faces turned to the wall.

Now here he is, with a massive hard-on, thinking of a woman who, by all accounts, he considers his own. Is this normal?

Nouche. That evening, she'd sat sucking a long, bloodred nail, and looking at the painting stacked against the wall, opposite her bed. She'd leaned in the pillows, in a slip and pale blue wool, narrowing her eyes at her canvas. Then she shrugged, and dropped the cardigan from her shoulders.

The painting was the London underground, the tunnel, with a powder blue square, like a doorway, opening at the end, at the center of the canvas. Instead of being tiled in black, like the original, the tunnel, which Nouche has been working on for days, today had been transformed. It was red.

It was a glossy, shiny, red Omar had not seen anywhere, ever, before, unless, perhaps, he'd thought, on a car: a deep, wet, Porsche red. 

Omar had been reminded, with a jolt, of his passion for automobiles. It stung, in his groin, this red: Grand Prix, F-1, fuck-off red.

He remembered, suddenly, his first car. His first ever love, perhaps, he thought, apart from his mother. This must have been thirty years ago, in Dubai, in transit: the Haji season. He must have been on his way to Mecca. He was a toddler. Awaiting a connecting flight, some time later that week, his mother had taken him, her eldest, and then only child, to the Dubai Zoo. It's one of his earliest memories. He remembers nothing of the pilgrimage, not the Kaaba, the holy stone, not the millions of pilgrims: not even one. He remembers the car.

He doesn't remember Dubai, the cool, sleek floors of the hotel, diamonds, the view, high rises under construction all round, like a skyscraper nursery. These things all come from his mother, who remembers, vividly. He remembers not even the Zoo. White tigers. Birds of paradise. Entire dynasties of chimpanzees, fighting, scrambling in the background, chasing one another in one great big, intergenerational feast of playing tag. This is all his mother.

Omar had noted none of it, nothing. He'd been at the wheel, of his first ever vehicle. Red, racy. His.

It had been a push cart, one of the car-shaped ones for hire at the entrance of the Zoo. It had been a truly blinding day, a scorcher even for Dubai, the sun burning the lanes of the zoo to noxious, drooling strips of tar. His mother had stood by helpless, as Omar stood parked before a back drop of frolicking Great Apes, refusing to look up from the wheel. She had stood by, trapped under the sun, wrapped in her veils like a mummy, until, finally, she'd sought refuge in one of the bus shelter-like structures scattered about the Dubai Zoo: glass, air conditioned waiting rooms, not against any cold or wind, but against everything else.

His mother had spent the day in that refrigerated glass cube, watching her son crawl in and out of his automobile, under the sun, testing the plastic doors, the wheel, and refusing to budge--infatuated, for the first time, with the outside world, with a world outside her reach.

Nouche. The cardigan had slipped from her shoulders, as she'd sat peering at the red tunnel in her painting, the finger, with a glossy red nail, still in her mouth. She'd further narrowed her eyes, and looked up at him through her lashes.

Before he knew it, it was deja vu all over, he'd taken the plunge and her tiny figure, so gracious and tense, had been dissolving under him, fanning out like something from a dream, something red and warm and wet, impossibly sleek and smooth, like an essence, an abstract of her, something all around.

She cried out, the red nails now grasping at the pillow, then waving in the air as she bit her forearm to keep silent.

He was plunging, he was lost in this red world, he was fucking her and no one else. This, too, was shocking, astounding. Unsettling. Unusual, to say the least. He gazed at her, afterwards, at her pale hands, those shiny nails.

She lay looking, again, at the canvas. I used nail enamel, she was saying.

What, Omar said.

Enamel, she repeated. 'For the shine.'

She used acrylics first, she explained, then a coat or two of oils. Nothing seemed quite right. It was somehow stilted, she said. Earnest. Dull.

Omar nodded.

Later that night, or early the next morning, Tuesday, Omar is standing alone, in his bathroom. He is staring in the mirror. He is hungry. He needs to hurry. Seven minutes till dawn. 

Time to eat. There's a blessing in Suhar.

He looks down. Godzilla's still staring up.

In bed with Nouche, earlier that day, he'd been listening to her talk about the painting. It was exasperating, she'd said. She been unable, somehow, to lighten it, she said, to lift it from its meaning.

She'd waved in the air. Let it float, she said, away into abstraction.

Some place, she'd said, of its own.

He'd nodded. She'd scared him, just now, in bed. He did not want to talk. He wanted her to shut up, he wanted, most of all, to keep his own mouth shut, to be silent, and quiet. At peace.

I'm fucking only you, he'd blurted.

She'd looked at him, uncomprehending.

I never used to.. want that, he added, clumsy. But I do.. want you..

She relaxed. That's, she said, a good thing, right..?

He gazed at her, grateful, somehow, for her trust, her innocence. Urr.. Ye-eah.. he nodded, with a dumb, wide, half assed sort of grin.

Tonight, before the mirror, he is, however, still freaked out. He lusts after his own woman. With a passion.

He glances at his watch. He has five minutes to eat.

After his blurted confession, that evening, Nouche had brought her pale hand, her blood-red nails, to her mouth. 

She yawned. 

Then glanced back at the canvas.

He'd sat gazing at her, at the hand still resting under her chin, and realized she'd just been telling him she'd laquered her painting this exact Chanel enamel red.

The powdery square at the center had been set afloat. It hovered at the end of the tunnel, which itself was dislocated somehow from its setting. Dislodged.

It was a glistening passage, going nowhere, from nowhere: disembodied flesh, brutal, vacant space. It was an essence, an abstract, of her.

Allah, Omar moans, gazing down, where Godzilla, with a final twitch of the head, lies deflating at last, in his hand.. It's a painting, he's thinking. I just got off on a painting. He stares in the mirror, shuddering still. Of her.

Omar peers in the glass, chilled to the bone, appalled and effusive, overflowing with happy confusion, wearing that same idiotic grin.

He glances at his watch. This took all of two minutes. 

He looks out the window, which is dark, dead of night still, as far as Omar is concerned, but fuck me, he thinks. Verily. What does he know?

Back to the watch. Three minutes left. Three minutes left for Suhar. 

He is starved.