The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir. Susan Daitch

comic routines reduced to bile. On the other hand, suppose the accused, framed and convicted, survives the ordeal, but someone needed the ingested text to be destroyed. The ancient murderer, who knew nothing of digestion or anatomy, could not be sure the body would do this work for him, and therefore would personally resort to the blade to finish the job.

      Out my window I could see a plane skywriting a series of letters that finally spelled out: Luna Park. I turned back to reading the scroll in my narrow rooms, as if it were no more rare or unusual than Sunday morning funny papers. The apartment next door had been broken into twice in the middle of the day. I’d been home during one incident and hadn’t heard a thing. The safety of the scroll wasn’t a major concern; rare would be the thief who knew or cared what the hell this thing was. In case of fire the scroll was kept in the freezer, which was usually empty anyway. On one occasion, my neighbor who lives on the floor below me nearly burned the place down when one of her candles fell over and ignited a dishrag. There’s a fire house a couple of blocks away, and with little traffic in the middle of the night, they managed to get here instantly. My downstairs neighbor writes a syndicated astrology column, and even though she writes under a pseudonym and makes no bones (to me at any rate) about the fact that all her predictions are stabs in the dark, she’s not the kind of person who will ever give up candles scented like vanilla, gardenia, and a chemically produced lemon that smells like floor cleaner. We all ran out into the street. While others worried about clothes, photographs, valuables and jewelry left upstairs, and how lucky we all were to get out in time, all I could think about was the contents of my freezer. The astrologist babbled, in black pants and pink shoes ready to go clubbing, to go see Stiv Bators at Darinka or 8BC, high as a kite: Virgo this, Capricorn that. No wonder she hadn’t been able to predict the fire in advance. No flames licked the windows. The fire department contained the blaze to her place, and red-eyed, we all trooped back in. The phone rang. Ada Koppek, who else?

      “Ada, we just had a fire here. I have a headache from the smoke. Call back another time.” The building smelled of burnt astrology books.

      “Darling,” I could hear her playing with the silver links on her watch, “why don’t you just swallow a tablet? Adam, my one and only grandson, a headache isn’t the end of the world.”

      The fire was too large and potentially catastrophic an event for her to assimilate. She would skip it altogether. I agreed with her, yes, most definitely I’d made a mistake. I’ll eat my words. The Williamsburg clock tower was shrouded in black netting, as it was being repaired, but I was aware of the time. I wanted to get back to work, to find out what would happen to Q and L.

      “So do you know where your sister, Ruthie, is? I heard she’s getting married.”

      “Yes, I know, I’m her husband. She’s already married.” I didn’t tell Ada we were in the process of getting divorced. There was no point. It was more information than she could handle.

      “Not you. To someone else. A Choiman. Listen, a Choiman from France. I told you. His uncles read Gerta from Nancy to Drancy. Who was Gerta?”

      Translation: someone read Goethe from Nancy to the transit camp at Drancy. Ada was baffled. No one told her anything. She sat in the dark. But maybe she was right, and in a moment of lucidity she realized that she wasn’t talking to her grandson, but to me, and Ruthie was, in fact, planning to marry Saltzman.

      “Ada, I’m watching the news. Call me later.” I hung up knowing Ada would forget the conversation we just had and call me again within the week. More pictures flickered across the screen: desert explosions, oil refineries on fire, a glimmer of an interview with an Iraqi soldier who hoped the war with Iran would end soon.

       “Why don’t you get out and walk?” Southern Gentleman Gambler “You can’t put me off a public conveyance!” Gatewood, banker

       Stagecoach

      John Ford, 1939

      THE PHONE RANG AGAIN.

      “Hello. Ariel Bokser?”

      “Yes.”

      “This is Ariel.”

      “Who?”

      “It took me a while to find you, but I’m at the corner of Neptune and Coney Island Avenue, at Mezzenotte Pizza. This is near you, no? I’m waiting. Come as soon as you can. We shouldn’t be seen together, but we need to meet.”

      I recognized the voice and unmistakable accent before I had a chance to speak. The intersection of Neptune and Coney Island isn’t near where I live, but I rushed out the door to the subway. A train was just leaving as I ran down the stairs to the platform. The platform, the subwayness of the subway made it difficult to retrieve images of the city almost halfway around the world. Every detail of my present city bombarded.

      While I waited, leaning against a blue column, I noticed someone had made an origami swan out of a white gum wrapper. The tiny bird was stuck to the column with bits of gum, so it looked like it had stopped mid-downward-swoop. It occurred to me that I spent a lot of my life underground, and I was reminded of a song on a science record I had when I was a child. The earth is like a great big grapefruit. Twenty-five thousand miles around. You could dig from here to China, if you could dig through the ground. The lyrics were followed by tinkling music that was meant to sound Chinese, then the voice resumed by saying in a minatory tone: But you can’t.

      Ten minutes later the next train arrived, crowded because of the delay. A deaf mute entered the car honking a series of horns in a rendition of Oh What a Beautiful Morning! He moved his head back and forth in time, and he lurched when the train swerved. He must have suffered a stroke at some point in the past, because half of his face had fallen. “Yo, Harpo, c’mere,” a man standing next to me shouted in futility as the deaf mute approached our part of the car, then we staggered toward him to put some coins in the paper cup, our change falling to the floor, quarters, nickels swallowed up, disappearing. It’s rare to see subway performers this far out on the line, but then the deaf mute got off at the next stop, crossed over to the opposite platform, honking out his songs up the stairs in order to reverse his trip.

      The train stalled between Kings Highway and Avenue U, but forty minutes later I was at Mezzanotte Pizza. The walls were covered with drawings of local people and celebrities who ate there: Tony Bennett, Abe Beam, Barbara Stanwyck, if you could believe it. Teenagers sat conspiratorially in one booth, an old man sat in another, but that was about it. No Rostami. I ordered a slice at the counter and asked if anyone fitting his description had come into the restaurant in the past hour.

      “A guy who looks kind of like you?” the fellow at the cash register asked. He drew with a pencil whose silver finial was chewed down to a molar-shaped nugget.

      I nodded.

      “Yes, he was here for a while, then he left.” He held up his sketch. On the back of a receipt he had drawn a picture of Javanshah Rostami. He was here.

      I expected to hear from Jahanshah Bokser again, but in the days that followed not even Ada Koppek had any interest in talking to me. Rostami wasn’t listed in the phone book under my name, his own, or some hybrid combination of the two, unless he’d devised an unknown anagram. The shells of Bokserness can easily be shrugged off like a snake’s old skin, passport tossed out, lying in a landfill upriver. There are always those pieces of home under your fingernails that you don’t want to clean, and leave as they are for as long as possible. Or you gather around you all the rags of your past life that you can muster until they become a kind of shelter. Rostami had left his children, his family, a longing greater than any I could imagine. Followed by now unemployed Savak agents, I imagined him as me reunited with Ruthie, teaching at a university with office hours and assistants to look up details about the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 that divvied up Persia.

      Sometimes I sensed a man or woman was following me, but it may only be that I was anticipating Jahanshah to overtake me, tap me on the shoulder. Once in midtown a woman in a leather jacket with very wide lapels and sharp-toed boots seemed to be only a few yards behind me. Every time I turned around, there she was. This went on for blocks. I watched out of the corner