Pray begin.
“Ten days ago, a plane crashed landed in a nondescript location in Nigeria. One of our delta forces planted out there found your dead body. There were no known survivors. All 421 passengers are presumed to be dead.”
So it was all a CIA stunt? I tried to put the missing logical pieces together.
“That’s fantastic.”
“That’s not the fun part.”
“Then?”
“Tell me Mr. Post, during your so called hiatus have you encountered any alien race?”
“Well it’s Africa.”
“Please cut down the fancy part,” the CIA agent warned. “You know what I mean.”
“No. What do you mean?”
“In your trance state after we brought you here, you bespoke many strange words of a foreign language and kept saying ‘Dogon!’ ‘Dogon!’ and ‘Don’t leave me here….”
“I do not know what you speak of.”
“Mr Post this is of most national urgency.”
“And why is that?”
“You don’t understand do you?” the man took Post to an adjacent room and turned on a big screen: “Just like Facebook algorithm we have a software.”
Facebook! Does it mean I am back in current century? At least close by. I wondered. “The software allows us to view your entire biography. It spiders, siphons and sluices for information out there distilling from Youtube, hacking VHS uploads, configuring social security and ..” as he noted these I saw my entire life flash before my eyes. There I was smoking in parking lot in surveillance video, cat-calling a hooker, almost running through speedlight. Entire life has been documented in a pregenerated video.
“Do you recognize yourself?”
Then I looked at myself. My tanned looks, my strange hirsute organs, my tilted accent. “The flight that was derailed seemed to gone missing,” the CIA agent went on: “But we have a different theory.” Then he leaned forward: “We have a reason to believe it was hijacked and blown off.”
“What?” I was genuinely surprised.
“Perhaps, this man on screen may shed some light.” The light flashed a middle-eastern man with moustache and stubs, and scruffy hair.
“So?”
“Mr. Post,” the agent was silent for a while. “Does this look familiar to you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Would you perhaps be shanghaied into ponying up now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t fuck with me. You know it damned well what I mean.” Then he spoke slowly: “Did you have any alien encounter?”
“No,” I flatly denied.
“Oh well. Take some rest then,” he left.
I stumbled across the room, and balanced myself on a nearby basin. There was a miniature tooth-paste, hotel-stolen shampoos, and a small toothbrush. No razor. I reached for the tube and calmly put a little dab on the brush. I looked at the mirror and got shock of my life.
Three days later
Mr. Post came to a bus-stop calmly sat down and nudged his head in a newspaper. He paid no attention to nearby and was highly aware when the bum with the shopping cart trundled pass him.
He stopped and sipped a brown-wrapped bottle. Her girlfriend, another lady with crazy demeanor and cantankerous mood started arguing with the man.
“Shut up,” he yelled raising a few looks from nearby wait-stands. “Bitch shut the fuck up, you don’t know Dan could’ve raised the rate, so why borrow her the book then bitch? You on meth on sumthin’, you fuckin dyke.”
“Shut up John. Just fuckin shut up.”
“No why don’t you shut your horny little mouths and those pussy lips of your yu fuckin scraggy whore…fuckin winch…”
“Shut up John, just don’t make a scene here.”
I paid no attention to the scene. Tried my best to avoid eye-contacts but the situation was getting tense.
The man kept arguing back and forth with the woman with increasing sip. “You gave the corndog to the fuckin mezzo [inaudible] phone croon, you fuckin kyke…you fuckin cunt faced dipshit. Even after I repeatedly told you not to trust that fuckin [inaudible] cocksuckin stool faced stooge you had to give him that, dinch you?”
“John you know it was a mistake. I didn’t know you would keep it there.”
“Shut up. Shut up!!” People around me got increasingly uncomfortable.
“Hey you two cut it out!” Said a college student, a boy of 22 of Latino descent with a Maori tribal band tattoo on his arm. He was wearing thin-rimmed glass and was a bit chubby with double-chin and a bit of flub around his belly.
“Fuckin you whore, you cunthole, I am gonna cut you in half. I am gonna slit your eyes out and throw the fuckin titties in Missippi river you bitch. You don’t know me. You fuckin whore, you don’t know a thang about me. Fuckin you see these? You see these…” he raised his shirt leaving some biker tattoo next to an overshadowed Virgin Mary mandorla: “These are fuckin legit penitentiary work. You know how I got’em? Ha you fuckin gutterhole.”
“John you are drunk.”
“Dude. Just stop,” another man broke in.
The man pulled out a blade and floundering and torpor walked ahead with dead-beat glance and made a Psycho-mudra to stab her to thrust her down.
“Stop!” I raised myself from the Register and motioned him with hand.
The entire scene froze. The bus came to a halt. The cars stopped dead in the tracks. The men who were walking paused to a stand still.
Despite my earlier false starts, I started getting hang of the power. Now I became adept on how to control it. Rational explanation of this seemingly dramatic countenance would be it was a typical scene in Israel where people pay homage by standing still on a give time-stamp. Logical-intuition however had different plans.
I looked up, up the shelf on which stood tube on top of taps, and looked at the mirror. The man before me was not Samuel Post. It matched the image of the terrorist on screen.
If it was my other-life I would have been guilty of this strange divine dividends. I mean I lost almost every hard-earned penny to a therapist only to have a psychedelic trip to come back as a doom-forsaken, god-muffin, fucking curse of a terrorist. But, after the initial shock and jolt, I started playing it cool.
The entire scene froze. The bus came to a halt. The cars stopped dead in the tracks. The men who were walking paused to a stand still. When you are the world’s most wanted deadliest terrorist, when the most recognized trending face looks at you who is guilty of a cold-blooded murder and linked to numerous plane hijacks and bomb explosions you are bound to stop.
But I was on a different zone. I knew precisely now how to control my affairs. The scene froze, but also on the other side of reality, it paused because I made it pause. I slowly walked up to the frozen man and unpacked him of the knife.
And then the scene melted. I stepped back in this reality as people started moving helter-skelter:
“It’s him! It’s him!”
“It’s Mohammad bin Zdane. Its fuckin him.”
“Fuckin run.”
Or another logical explanation could be someone called the police and the firemen brought the scene to a stand still. Whatever reason you choose to adopt is entirely you, but what stunned me the most was my memory lapse on how I escaped from the safehouse and why the following is about to take place:
A man in his thirties, well-dressed in Hawaiian shorts, and wearing a Panama hat came forward. “Okay that’s fine. That will do.” I looked around. There were camera crews everywhere.
“Zeeshan stop. That’s enough. It’s a wrap.” I looked around and quite as obviously along with firebrigade came the CARE ambulance and along with them the newscrew and cameras. But next a man came and put a powder-brush on my face.
I was in a Hollywood film.