Inside Straight

“Flee or fight. Serquet can summon scorpions, Bast sees well in the dark. Babi is strong as ten baboons, and I have many teeth. The rest have no powers, only funny heads. The army, they have guns and planes and tanks. Guns and planes and tanks beat funny heads. So we flee. Aswan is a good place, I am thinking. How to get there, though? That is not so easy. Taweret has summoned the gods to meet upon the morrow. You and your friend may come as well, and we will talk about what must be done.”

“Ja,” said Klaus, but his tone was dubious. He thought of Tut and Gamel, of the families in the yellow school bus, of the joker man who had thrown the rock at him. It was a wonder that any of them had survived the journey down from Cairo. Aswan was two hundred kilometers farther on. “Many will die,” he said to Sobek. “If you are forced to leave this place…they do not have the strength. There is no food, no water. To make them march—this is murder. The world will not allow it.”

“The world is not here.” Sobek plucked the cigarette from his teeth and flicked an inch of ash out the window.

“The secretary-general has come to Cairo—”

“—waiting for the Caliph. They will have a nice talk while the freaks are dying. Later perhaps the UN will pass a resolution, and a year from now there will be sanctions, yes? The Caliph will tremble, but we will all be dead.”

Klaus scowled. It was too true. “America—”

“—is watching television. John told us. Plastic babies burning up in fires, actors robbing banks, lies and seductions and betrayals, good stuff to watch. Old Kemel was a fool to make us gods. He should have made us television stars, and then the world might care what happens to us. But no, we are only jokers dying in the desert, and none of us will win a million dollars.”

He was not wrong, Klaus realized. By then they were passing through the camp, and Sobek was forced to slow. His truck was of the same vintage as the motorbike, but unlike the Enfield, it could not weave through traffic. Instead, the crocodile god shouted in Arabic at the people in their way. Klaus wondered if he wasn’t screaming, “Gods coming through! Make way for the Gods!”

If so, no one was listening.

Klaus looked out at the people again as Sobek leaned on his horn. Aside from a few obvious jokers, most of them looked no different from the fellahin he had glimpsed working in the fields during their long trek south, or the men who had hunted them through the necropolis of Cairo. They are all the same, all Egyptian, all poor, the ones who pray to Allah just as hungry as the ones who pray to Osiris. “You are so much alike,” he said to Sobek. “Why do you fight? Why do you hate each other?”

“I do not hate Muslims,” Sobek insisted. “My father was Muslim. My mother was Muslim. My sisters were Muslim, my friends were Muslim, my wife was Muslim, everyone I knew was Muslim. Even I was Muslim. Not a good Muslim, it is true, but I always meant to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead, my head began to pound one hot day as I worked a freighter, so I left the docks and went home early. My wife gave me a damp cloth to cool my fevered brow, and I went to sleep. When I woke I had the head of a crocodile.” He shrugged. “My wife fled screaming when she saw me. She was bringing me some mint tea in my favorite cup, and it shattered on the floor and scalded me. My sisters spat on me and called me foul, my doctor said the best cure for the wild card was a gun, my father told me his son was dead. When I went to pray to Allah, the imams said I was an abomination, but Kemel—Kemel found me passed out drunk in the City of the Dead, took me to his temple, fed me on mutton and lentils, and told me that I had become a god.” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew smoke through his nostrils. “It is better to be a god than an abomination. That is why I am no more a Muslim. But I cannot hate them, no. They are still my neighbors and my kin.”

This is so

, Klaus thought, but your neighbors and your kin, they want you dead.

~ ~ ~

It was dusk by the time they reached the Nile. Across the river, Klaus could see the lights of Luxor coming on. Over there were colorful bazaars, air-conditioned hotels, five-star cruise ships, fine restaurants, holy mosques, a modern hospital, museums full of antiquities, hot baths, and service stations with all the oil and gas a motorbike could want. Two divisions of the Egyptian Second Army had surrounded Luxor to “protect” the city from homeless refugees and joker terrorists alike, while navy gunboats patrolled the Nile to deny them any hope of crossing. The tourist-haunted ruins of Karnak and Thebes were on the east bank as well, just north of the modern city, but those, too, had been declared off limits to the dispossessed.