QUANTUM LEAP
Hisham BUSTANI;

The place had changed.
It wasn’t in the old city neighborhood anymore. No longer an apartment in a dilapidated building with crumbling walls, where the antiquated fan produced an occasional and feeble breeze as it creaked around collecting dust. No more rusty chairs hardly big enough to sit on, nowhere for dreams to soar.
The place had changed, flown off to a new neighborhood. Instead of one story, now there were two. It had become a villa with a yard in the front and a swimming pool in the back, plus a guardhouse, a red-tile roof, and air conditioning—and a closet for dreams.


      °


His writer-friends had invited him over. “A gift from the sultan,” they’d said, “with no strings attached.” So he went.
When he opened the glass door and poked his head in, a blast of cold air tickled the droplets of sweat beading on his forehead. He was struck by the large open space, vacant but for a hanging chair swinging from the ceiling, in which the silhouette of an otherwise invisible person sat holding an electric saw in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other.
Hanging from butchers’ hooks were the headless carcasses of lambs of different sizes. The walls were white but for bright splotches of red.  
The silhouette pointed to the newcomer.

“I see land-mines in his head,” said one carcass.
“I see pencils and pictures and questions,” said another.
“I see headless carcasses hanging from butchers’ hooks in his head,” said the third, as all the carcasses swung to and fro, humming, tails raised, spattering the walls with blood.
The silhouette pointed to the newcomer.
“That one needs a small frame so that his head can look big,” said one carcass.
“That head has a golden spoon in its mouth, to make us feel beholden,” said another.
“That’s the head of a poseur, of a womanizing intellectual,” said a third, as all the carcasses swung to and fro, humming, tails raised, spattering the walls with blood.
The silhouette sharpens the electric saw with the sheaf of papers, hitting the pages with the saw, and the red splotches on the walls move around, coalescing and separating: a hammer and sickle appear, no, it’s a five-pointed star, or maybe a stylized, arrow-like jeem next to an elongated map ... Is it a victory sign? A sun? A peasant? A laborer? Students? The patches of color and the shapes tumble and turn, forming a river that seeps along the corners of the room, through the hallway, and to the back door. The red river spills into the swimming pool.
The silhouette sharpens the electric saw with the sheaf of papers. “Come and get baptized,” he says to the head poking through the glass door. “We are the salvation,” the carcasses repeat, swinging to and fro, spattering more blood. “Come.”


        °

[Mental whirlwind]
The pool’s slimy water is reddish after the river of blood spills into it. A fire is lit underneath, and servants standing along the edges of the pool stir the liquid with a pole until it turns into a thick sludge, which is then cooled and ladled onto paper plates that were once books. In the evening, the carcasses gather around the pool table to eat the frozen sludge with a dollop of cream and a strawberry.
[What is churning inside the head poking through the door]
You’re just fighting with yourself. From deep in your gut, jagged words erupt, and like the boy who fell from Grandad’s balcony, they hurtle down onto the pages of the lexicon, the revolutionary one that the liar carries around and spits on: “Let him have a chair” the sultan says. The chair, a roll of tissue with which to wipe his shit.
Who are you? What are you? A phantom prancing inside an illusory body?
The silence of the slaughtered lambs alone will hold up the sultan’s throne.

       °
There is a large mirror across from the outer door as he is leaving. In the reflection, he can see he looks just the same as when he came in. Behind him, the place gradually transforms into a semblance of the sultan’s palace.
He spits on the mirror until his mouth runs dry. “How stupid I was.”
He makes a fist and slams it into the glass, and his hand goes right through. He kicks the glass and his foot comes out the other side. He leans his head in, and crosses over. When he turns around, the transformation is complete: there before him is the sultan's palace with its golden doors, its guards, and its surveillance cameras. He looks about, finds a stone and hurls it at the mirrored glass. It shatters. He turns on his heels to make the difficult escape but finds himself in the old neighborhood where children played soccer with a beat-up old ball and laundry hung from the balconies.
He smiles, scratches his head, and goes on his way, slowly. Ever so slowly.