Tacoma

Last night I dreamt about a girl called Tacoma. She was small and lost in early ‘80’s Defense Housing Authority Phase 5, where animals and rock formations ruled supreme, houses were few and far between and coffee pastry architecture was virtually unknown. She was trying to get out of the city.

Tacoma had been walking away from Karachi for a long time, but as she walked commercial buildings sprouted like flowers from the ground along her path and hemmed her into straight lines and ninety degree intersections where before there had only been vast, barren, space. Then she was suddenly no longer walking but bouncing along on eight brightly colored springs wrapped in tissue paper that were frayed at the edges like rose petals but somehow managed to retain shape. They gave off no scent, but she was terribly afraid a purple kangaroo would bound out of the bushes and try to mate with her, so she hopped along like Cassidey, only faster.

The springs wrapped like toffees with their twisty ends sticking up from either side seemed unstable and she was afraid they would unwrap and pitch her onto concrete. As the road went downhill she bent down, each hand hanging desperately onto opposite ends of the wrapping, like a contortionist clown at the circus of the damned. Tacoma’s back was aching, but she hopped on. She knew she had to get to Khayabane Badar. It was very important that she get there.

Right about the time she realized the earth and the concrete were locked in a conspirator’s embrace to keep her from her destination, people began pouring from the buildings and lining the roads. A rumor swept through the crowd, a silent but deadly tsunami. A parade was coming through here. A parade…a parade! Children were jiggling with excitement, and even the adults fidgeted like they had perma-wedgies.

Tacoma got worried. A parade of horses headed into the city, dissecting the land she had yet to explore and the places she hadn’t yet been. Brown skinned and white maned, rider less, rows and rows of them. What if their droppings concealed the secret signs by which she would know her path? She didn’t know where Khayabane Badar was, but she knew the horses were in her way. Maybe the people would help.

Tacoma must have asked a thousand people for directions. Well, more like five, but everybody shushed her. Couldn’t she see the animals were parading? Didn’t she know that this was what animals were for? They stood there and watched them with reverence, like the last march of the electric blue wildebeest of the Serengeti plains before they vanished in mist and memory, extinct. But the blue wildebeest probably weren’t saddled and bridled. Or had festering open sores and infected wounds dotting their bodies. The people didn’t seem to notice because they were still cheering. Tacoma ran along the line looking for a way to cross.

Then she saw the traffic policemen. They were wearing navy blue for a change, but she knew they were still traffic policemen. A man turned to her as she approached and leered. One end of her spring wrapping began to unravel so that she pitched forward and landed awkwardly in front of him. “Do you know where Khayabane Badar is?” She thought he would move his lechery to the next level, the verbal, but he seemed to react to something in her face and merely nodded and pointed. She would have to cross the road and walk up a hill, but the parade of horses showed no signs of letting up. And now there were camels too.

Tacoma decided she would cross that road even if an army of horses, camels and traffic policemen stood in her way. As abruptly as the buildings and policemen had appeared, the knowledge grew in her that she was the sort of woman who could do anything she wanted if she just put her mind to it. She had hardly finished the thought when the people and animals vanished and she found herself straddling a heavy duty motorbike and roaring down the deserted highways and byways of 2002 Defense phase 5. The commercial building had receded into the distance and been replaced by 500 and 1000 yard plots sporting mod architecture utilizing maximum space and minimum aesthetics. A dirty nala ran down the centre of the road. It seemed out of place, when she looked again it was gone and the line of houses stretched into the horizon, the sky, every direction there was, and Tacoma on her motorcycle was no closer to finding Khayabane Badar then she had been those eons ago when animals moved through here.

She must have spent hours on the motorcycle. It felt like years, and she thought her skin had lost some of its elasticity and her hair its gloss. But her muscles were firmer, lean, like motorcycle Irene from the Skip Spence poem she had read as a kid. “There she sits a smoking, reefer in her mouth, hair hanging northward as she travels south. Dirty on her Harley, but her nails are clean, super powered deflowered Motorcycle Irene.”

And that was like a clue, a hint of her past. She had a past. She wasn’t a dream. The impetus to find Khayabane Badar, lulled into passivity by the throbbing of the cycle between her legs, returned. But instead of taking her to the place she wanted to go she found herself driving suddenly into the dining room of her friend O, who was having lunch and needless to say wasn’t thrilled by the appearance of a motorcycle amongst the mutton. “But you know where it is, you lived a street away for ten years.” Again, something in her face made him humor her, like the traffic policemen and she wondered whether she was a beauty or a witch; was it desire or fear that made these people indulge her? Was it something else? Could there be any other motive in the world?

Tacoma now had two clues. She had a past, and ten years of it had been spent a street away from Khayabane Badar. But even O couldn’t seem to navigate the endless streets and they returned, exhausted, to his house. When he got off she noticed her muscles had become even younger and firmer, and she was now wearing leather.

“You have to get off that bike,” O was trying to tell her; “the speed is killing you.”
“No it likes me.”
“Look what its doing to you.”

But Tacoma knew he just resented…well…resented something or the other, maybe the speed, maybe the muscles, and she kicked off again and roared back down the tree lined street with her hair flying behind her.

A pack of dogs appeared seamlessly from the scenery on her left and loped alongside. How could they keep up with the bike? Didn’t she know some of them? Hadn’t she played with them when she was younger? Hadn’t she played with them on Khayabane Badar? Isn’t that where so many of them had crept to die from strychnine…under the overhangs of rocks that had since been dynamited to make way for more ugly houses? Wasn’t that Tubbo who got run over by a careless neighbor? Wasn’t that Brownie who died from starvation after iodine deficiency, his tongue swollen into a grotesque parody of itself?

Tacoma was no longer on her bike. She was on her hands and knees scrabbling for stones to throw at the pristine windows and naked facades of the houses built on canine graveyards and doggy bones.

“Animals”, she was screaming, “you’re the animals.”

Moti detached herself from the end of the pack (the front runners were beginning to vanish into nothing) and came to nuzzle. Moti had been the mother of most of the strays she had adopted, and the last to die. “Remember the Kinky Friedman novel about his cat?” Moti said, “remember the line?”

And Tacoma did remember the line. They say that when you die all the pets you’ve ever had in your life will come running to greet you.

Tacoma rose and looked for the bike (her bike?) but it had vanished with Moti. And she could see Khayabane Badar in the distance. In the time it took her to run to it she had no thoughts, no feelings, just the faultless sense of direction of an automaton executing a programme, but when she got there the world gave a convulsive heave, like a canine on strychnine, and nothing was as she remembered it.

Khayabane Badar was a line of whitewashed villas opening onto the crystal blue waters of a sea unlike any Arabian sea she had ever known. This was wrong, because it was supposed to be significantly inland. Every house was white, and impeccably furnished. She knew, because every door swung open as she approached and every floor was accessible via a spiral staircase in perpetual rotation in the air before her. And there was no human being in sight. Khayabane Badar was a ghost town. The world had shifted, like the continents long ago, and the same two edges would never be realigned again

Tacoma finally understood she would never be able to go home again.