REORIENT:

My clothes were sticking to me; it had been one hell of a summer’s day. I can vaguely recall the hot, viscid bodies on the streets, draped in blue, and the kohl-rimmed eyes of gamelan singers obscured by the sun. In the back of a black taxicab, my feet felt as if they were about to burst out of all that smooth leather, and I sensed a familiar light, one of childhood years up north, seep in through the windows. Performance was playing that evening, in some stuffy hole in the wall; more hot, viscid bodies, more kohl-rimmed eyes. Let’s have a look! Through diaphanous tapestries I descried tumbling figures being kissed and bitten, to the ringing sounds of the santur and the language of the birds, naked alabaster flesh rubbing against the soft knots of Persian rugs, and frankincense smoke arising from behind a gilded Qajar-era mirror. From Jagger’s pouty lips debouched the tale of the Old Man of the Mountain, the gatekeeper of Paradise up high in the crags of Alamut, and from a little stereoscope, brightly-coloured images of Puhhshia. ‘But I don’t want to go to America,’ protested the gamine Lucy from beneath silken sheets, ‘I wish to be a bandit in Persia’. If my linen shirt had thitherto been sticky, it was now wet. I never found out if Lucy, Pherber, and Turner eventually made it there; amongst the three, perhaps only Chas, the one on the run, attained the object of his desire. Gone to Persia, read the blue ink of the brusque note he tossed on his bed.

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