Jogging With Roussel 16 Part 6

The night before Abū-Tāhir Al-Jannābī was to visit the jail wherein Fogar / Abu'l-Fadl al-Isfahani had been secreted, Abū-Tāhir had a strange dream. He was the night watchman in an immense prison which hovered in the sky, and which resembled a rose without a stem, a black rose. As he carried his lantern down the consecutive hallways which gently curved, he realized he must be within the thickness of one of the petals. Growing curious about the structure of the prison, he began to notice that the bars of the prison cells ran horizontally instead of vertically, and that instead of standard round iron bars, that these horizontal encumbrances were in fact cursive metal calligraphy which he could read, but every cell he came to said the same thing, a veritable litany of words and phrases that all referred to emptiness, and there were no prisoners, not one. Up and down many stairs and across and back through many petals did Abū-Tāhir wander until he entered a central and bud like chamber which housed a bud composed of a grille of metal calligraphy which repeated the same phrase over and over without end: Who is the Mahdi ad-Dajjāl? And at first it seemed as if there was no one inside, but finally someone spoke to him from inside, and the voice said, “Man jadda – wajada…” And then Abū-Tāhir saw a beautiful snow-white peacock with a marvelous pink crest like the bloom of a guli abrisham, or night sleeper. Abū-Tāhir now felt as if he must really be having a prophetic dream, and just as he fell down on his knees, a tiny little old man poked his head out from behind the neck of the peacock.. “Abrakadamn!” cried the little bearded man leaping out and showing himself, and standing in full view on the back of the peacock. “Now where the sura is my Sara? You know, Que será, sera?” Then Abū-Tāhir at once grew slightly angry with the little man who was speaking to him obviously in a sarcastic and disrespectful manner. “I AM ABRAHAM, BOY, I AM YOUR FATHER!” And then the little man shook his ass at Abū-Tāhir, and showed him his rump, and to Abū-Tāhir’s surprise it had a little tail which poked through his djellaba or toga or whatever it was he was wearing. Abū-Tāhir then wanted to kill the little man, and he began to fumble with his key ring, but as he fumbled the keys were likened unto metallic scorpions of calligraphy, the words badly parsed. “Foul parsing!” heckled the little Abraham, “Fal Parsi!” Then Abraham lifted up his cloak and showed Abū-Tāhir his crotch which at first infuriated Abū-Tāhir until he looked closer. “You have no warrant to enter MY JAIL, Abū-Tāhir.” Growing quiet, and crawling on his knees to peer between the lines of the metallic calligraphy grille cage, the little Abraham’s phallus was beautiful. Like a perfectly carved but unknown animal’s head made of obsidian. It was actually a tiny building, and Abū-Tāhir could see hundreds of perfect replicas of the little man standing on miniscule balconies waving joyously at him. Abraham’s phallus was like the head of Set made into a contemporary luxury hotel in miniature, but the image was falling on eyes informed only by a poverty of experience, of rote training by well-wishing but ignorant men. Abū-Tāhir finally stood up, and said desperately, “Demon!” “Yeah, I am de-Man, John Russel!” laughed Abraham, and broke off his tail with a loud SNAP! And threw it perfectly through the words of the prison grille to land at the feet of Abū-Tāhir who awoke with a terrible pain in his side, as if from laughing. In his hand was a hard compressed nut-like kernel which smelled rather familiar, yet different than anything he knew still. Not wanting to alarm anyone, he quickly put the object in a box by his bedside, and got up refreshed to meet the day, casting off the night’s strange bewitchment. Somehow that morning, a Venezuelan Coumara nut found its way into Abū-Tāhir’s bedside box which was lined with an unlikely crimson velvet, and only contained one more object, a small dried monkey’s hand which smelled of bitter cinnamon.