[b]Sevan, Armenia[/b] Sahle was alone in a dark room. He had crawled in on his own, banged up by a bizarre mix of Dr Feelgood and tranquilizers. This was a mix Marc had concocted in a mescaline and corn liquor induced stupor, curled up in a naked sweaty ball in the corner of the room while Sahle and Yared watched the droning patriotic Armenian song that signaled the end of television for the night. The freaky little addict had sworn by his twisted blend, and at the end of the next day's set Sahle had decided to wind down and try it. It was not good. It fucked him up. He supposed he had been high-strung since getting back from the Georgian border, where some shaky Russians had bought a crate full of Feelgood from them. That had been Vasily's idea, and he had brought along a ridiculous Chinese warrior to help them out. Sahle had expected to get shot, and for the entire truck-ride he had watched hills ominous with black trees and imagined himself holding his own guts as he bled to death in some forgotten misted forest far away from fucking everything. Vasily had made it worse, telling stories of a famous mustachioed Georgian bandit called 'Koba' who's gang had haunted them hills for the first half of the century. The thought of some band of highwaymen from a cheap European movie, robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, did not make Sahle feel better. If they'd put the screw you for being wealthy, what would they do to you if they found you were selling drugs? When the deal was made, nothing violent happened. It had been a tense situation, but Vasily handled it like the expert mercenary that he was, and they got away safely. Everything had felt fine, until they began to leave. That is when Vasily had pointed out the beasts watching the entire deal from the bald ridge above them. Two beings with the bodies of men, the long guns of soldier-men, and the real-deal heads of man-eating horses. That had meant something else to Vasily, but Sahle did not know what. Those fucking horse-men haunted his highs now. He couldn't shake the bastards. Hours passed by. He lay in the ground, smelling the sour flavor of his own vomit on the floor next to him. He could hear water flow in the creaking pipes that stood naked against the walls. When somebody flushed a toilet or turned on a sink, he could hear the pipes jerk as water began to trickle through them. The sound of flowing water reminded him of his own internal plumbing, and how food became excrement and blood. He imagined blood moving through his veins, and his imagining became so intense that he could feel it. The flow of his own blood now felt like one million little strings tugging on his insides. That was gross. He felt sick again. He curled up in a ball and closed his eyes. The anomalous lights and patterns that seemed to play on his eyelids, like spasmodic movie from a broken film projector, slowly formed into what Sahle's paranoid mind couldn't accept as a hallucination. It was another fucking horse-man's head. Or a horses head? He didn't give a shit about the technicalities, he just knew it was spooky. He opened his eyes again, so quick and so sudden that he gasped unintentionally. He felt that familiar feeling, the one that everybody who was acquainted with hallucinogens knew, where he wondered if he would ever be normal again. Hours went by as he patiently worked at focusing his mind. When he felt calm enough to close his eyes again, he took a nap. When Sahle woke up, the drugs were no longer working their effects. He was hungry now, and he judged that it was time to leave the room. He wandered the halls of the Dead Man's Drink until he found the kitchen. It was a small room with a broken stove and cupboards full of canned food. At the end of the Armenian Revolution, the government began to sell surplus food stuff bought from Persia and Ethiopia to feed their military in the absence of Turkish products. They had done this in order to make up some of the massive debt that war had dumped on the young government, and in doing so they had filled the pantries of its people with cheap foreign-produced food made to remain edible long after it had lost all it's flavor. Old man Horasian was as patriotic as he was cheap and flavorless, and he had bought more than his share of it. Wheat from Ethiopia, yoghurt from Persia, canned fish from Oman, and dried fruit from the Congo, all in the most non-descript dull packaging that could be conceived. Most of these cheap ingredients went into sticky soups. He found the leftovers of one of these soups in a stained chest refrigerator in the corner of the room. It stuck to the bowl now, more a paste than a soup. He scooped it with his hands. It tasted like lumpy, sour milk. Old man food. Still, he was hungry, and he kept scooping until his fingers were sticking together and the bowl was empty. "Samel." it was the drawn out voice of Yared. He turned around to see his friend standing in the doorway. "How was the stuff?" "Friend, it was no good." Sahle replied. "I saw horses all night." "Horses?" Yared smiled. "What did they do to you, friend?" "They scared me. That was all, friend. I'm no sick freak who dreams about fucking horses." Yared laughed. "I was not thinking that until now. Was it the gangsters?" "The... yeh." he remembered. The men on the hill with the horse-heads had been Russian gangsters. That is was Vasily had told them on the way back to Armenia. "They made me shiver too." Yared said. He went to get a glass of water, the pipes clanking as his cup filled. "I hope that is all Oziryan wants from us, friend. If we are done, maybe everything can calm down and we can focus on the tunes." "Yes." Sahle replied. What was normal now? He hadn't had much time to think about it, but when the thought of slowing down came, he always remembered that he wasn't Samel. His past had came flooding back into his mind when he heard that Azima and her children might be dead. He had never felt much for Azima, though she had been a good lay. Still, she was part of his childhood. And Yaqob... he was his brother, even after the war, and their child had been Sahle's [i]nephew[/i]. He had once had a nephew, one he had never knew, and now the boy was dead. "Samel friend, what is weighing you down?" "Nothing." Sahle replied. "I am still feeling the effects of that mix." "It was a potent mix." Yared agreed. "Something Marc would do, but not you." Sahle wiped his beard with the back of his hand and sniffed. "Well, I did it though." "True." Yared eyed him suspiciously now. "Is it Aaliyah?" "What?" "I am not feeling the vibes anymore, friend. Not like they once were. Is it her?" "No, brother." Sahle replied. "She is my girl." Yared looked at him sympathetically for a silent moment. "Of course she is, friend. She is writing a song now. She said that the news is bringing her to think about things, you know. I mean, what is the world coming to, friend? All the people of Africa want is peace, brother, but everybody around the world keeps giving them war." "War." Sahle repeated. "Yes. Yes, I will go see her now. Where is she?" "On the boardwalk out back, at that big picnic table." "Right." Sahle smiled. "Thank you, friend." -- The morning sunlight hit Sahle's eyes like headlights on a dark road. The back door of the Dead Man's Drink emptied into an alleyway, its garbage pails and dented asphalt pristine from the morning clean up. It connected to a single-lane gravel service road, beyond which the city met the lake front. From where Sahle stood, the alley faced out toward the wide open Armenian landscape, where empty hills rolled on for miles towards the foothills of the Caucasus. He crossed the service road barefooted. The jabs of gravel did not bother him, and he was in the grass soon enough anyway. In front of him was the grassy slope that ran down toward the water, before which was a wooden walkway. On a typical morning, this path was trafficked by elderly people watching the sun rise across the lake, or by younger tourists trying to work off a hangover. Today there was nobody except for Aaliyah sitting at a table with her white cocktail dress flowing over the bench. He sat down next to her, and when he saw her face he feigned a friendly grin. That face, the painted half given to her by the dollmaker, still made him cringe inside. "Where the fuck is everybody?" he asked, looking all around. She smiled softly. Or, at least part of her face smiled while the other half remained cold and clay. "The fishermen have been charging people a dram to take them near the island. The army is practicing their fighting, and people want to catch a peek." "Oh." he nodded. "That must be where the old man has gone." "He went out at first light. I think he must be back by now." she replied. "But Samel, where have you been? You have been gone so much." He felt blindsided by the question. He did not know why, it made sense that she would ask, but he couldn't think of what to say. It felt like he had been caught, though all he had been doing was... "Drugs." he blurted. "Drugs?" she asked. "You didn't really do that stuff Marc made? It sounded dangerous." "I did." he affirmed. "It was some supreme shit too. Marc is the greatest chemist in the world, or drug chemist or... I bet he is better than the guy on the acid tablets." "The 'Try me' guy? You know he is not a real guy." "How do you know?" "Because who would dress like that." she giggled. Sahle was feeling comfortable now, and he began to forget about her face. Still, it seemed strange. He felt like he was looking at an old friend. She was an old friend with great breasts, that he would never deny, but he didn't feel like this was love anymore. He considered that this maybe what married people felt like. Still, the breasts. Her dress was strapless so that it showed her cleavage. It had been a strange habit of hers to wear white show-clothes everywhere she went, and it made her look like some sort of excited bride out to lunch in her dress before the wedding. He reached out and began to tug at it. "You know, there is nobody out here now. Why don't we do it right here?" "Stop." she swatted his hand weakly. "Not now. On the table? No, that is awful." He thought it was funny that she would say no to a table when they had done it on the sacred ground where Jesus was born. "Well, not on the table." he bit his lip. "In the road. Why don't we do it in the road?" "No." she said flatly. Her fake eye fell on him, and its lifeless gaze killed his lust as quickly as if lightning struck her and instantly turned her into a shaved bear. "I'm writing songs." she explained, trying to make sweet after she had shot him down. "You know, i've been reading poems and trying to learn how." "Right." Sahle nodded. "The war, that is what is inspiring me, you know? I feel like this is the most important thing that will happen in our lifetime. You know what they are saying on the streets?" "No" "The Armenians think that China is going to declare war soon, and they think that Spain will declare war on Armenia since the government is on such good terms with Addis Ababa. Somebody told me that Brazil means to declare war on Spain too." "Does it?" "You know, ever since we left Cairo I have felt like the world was a rotten place. But maybe that is going to change now. Maybe, if all the world comes together to stop the Imperialists, everything will turn out good after all. Maybe justice will win. What do you think, Samel?" "I don't know much about these things." Sahle said. "Oh, we don't talk as much now Samel. Not like we used to. Will you come to my room tonight? If you do, I promise we will make love just like you wanted to do in the road, just like old times. Maybe we can talk then, get things back to normal. Everything has been so awful since the shooting, but that is over now. We can have our life." "Yes." Sahle smiled. "I will be there tonight." -- For the rest of the morning, Sahle felt uneasy. He knew that deep down, he did not want to go to Aaliyah that night, and that disturbed him. She had been so much to him before, and he had thought that maybe she would be the silver lining in his exile, and that he would find in her the sort of love his father had found in his mother. Instead, she was becoming a chore. He daydreamed about fucking the Russian woman. She was an exotic piece of the pale-skinned north, and there was a burning sexuality to her that fascinating him. But what did that mean? Was he just made to be the sort of man that never settled down? How could he possibly do that now he was a penniless nobody? What he needed was more drugs. He found Marc incoherent in the prop department staring at mannequins. Marc looked at Sahle with dialated, excited eyes. "We are all naked, brother, except for all our clothes." He said. But Sahle had no time for that. He spent an hour begging his friend for something powerful. When he got what he wanted, he went to his room and lost his mind in the psychedelic otherworld. He did not find himself in strawberry fields, nor did he end up back in the nightmare forests of Georgia. His hallucinations transported him back to the past, to a time when he first found work at the Pharoah Club in Cairo. It was not a single memory, not something he could put a date on, but the power of the mutated memory was enough to make him feel as if he had been in this exact moment once. It was all there, the gangly Barnham calling everyone in the ethereal crowd his 'Loves' from the back of a chariot pulled by lions, the faux Sphinx dominating above the dance floor and the walls painted to look like the bright and sunny Egypt of the Pharaohs, and the were the dancing girls in their cages. He saw it all from everywhere at once, like a child staring into the room of a dollhouse as their imagination carried them away. The dancing girls had always been a favorite, always topless and freaked out on some sort of chemical. They were in stone cages hanging from the ceiling near where plaster replicas of Egyptian statues pissed alcohol into troughs. The girls were ghosts to him, writhing female shapes in a sea of Cairo elites and Ottoman soldiers on leave. He only had eyes for one. This had been the place he had met Aaliyah all those years ago. She had been something unique to him then, a girl who cared about him even though he had no money or power to flaunt. He felt like he was watching her for hours, like a personal dance just for him. The music grew slower, the lights went dim, and people cycled out of the club one by one. It was near midnight now. He did not know how he knew the time, but he did. Perhaps it was the reflection of an old instinct, his subconscious playing out the schedule he had remember in his short time working for Barnham. He hoped that when they had all left, it would be him and her, and they could make love under the watchful eyes of a sphinx. But then a man handed her money and the two of them left together, and Sahle remembered that it had been her job to be nice to people. People like Sahle and Aaliyah, they were not made to be together. They had lost that part of their humanity long before they met each other. When the room was empty, Sahle got a good look at it. It wasn't the same place now. The paint on the walls was caked thick in some places and cracking in others. One of the urinating Pharaohs had a broken cock, and alcohol piss sprayed haphazardly from the crater. He saw that there was lion dung on the gilded stage and stains in the floor, and the faux Sphinx was of such a poor quality that he wondered if school children had made it. A phantom party mulled about on the empty floor, and he remembered all of their excesses from a different perspective. This had not been a party, it had been scatological horror show. It had been a club where nasty drunks and worn out whores came waste the hours until their back-alley deaths. There was a hard truth in the club that Sahle had not comprehended when he had worked there, but there were glimpses of it in the drug-induced memories that overpowered him now. It had been like the decadent and boundless orgies of Heliogabalus, the last lewd hurrah of failing Empires. This was the end of the Ottoman Turks, the people who drank in the wealth of the east and celebrated imperium with harems and hashish, and who's one thousand years of fratricidal palace intrigues had came to their climax at the same time Sahle entered Armenia. But there was another Empire ending here. It was also the last hurrah of the 19th century European dream, the mission civilisatrice and the gentlemen who had dreamed it. Those last few orientalists of the old type, the intellectual playboys of Europe who saw the east as a lamp-lit gateway to everything mystical and erotic, this was their place and Stanley Barnham was one of their dying breed. These two, the Ottoman and the European, partied stupid for as long as time would allow, because they knew that when the sun came up over the cold new world, they would be left in a syphilitic gutter to be forgotten.