The Unknown Known
It was he, you see, who sponsored my initial audience with the One Eyed One (aka the One with One Eye, the Mullah, the Emir, the Commander of the Faithful) that June: the June that preceded September. There has been much speculation in the press about this — about whether the Mullah actually approved the attack on America. The truth is that he voiced his doubts and, at first, withheld his blessing. And his doubts were not the obvious ones — that he would a) forfeit his country, and b) spend the rest of his life in hiding.
No. What worried him were considerations best described as ‘ideological’ (I quote from The 9/11 Commission Report, which, with rather exaggerated nonchalance, we are all passing around). The One Eyed One wanted the autumn initiative ‘to attack Jews’ (ibid.). Already aware of this settled emphasis of the Mullah’s, I mildly exaggerated the anti-Semitic component (at that point non-existent) of UU: CRs/G,C when I came to make my presentation. The prospect of September 11, by the way, did not deter the Mullah from going ahead with, or getting started on, his autumn campaign against the Northern Alliance, solemnly inaugurated on September 10.
Having made the six-day journey to our second city, I joined the queue in the back yard of the One Eyed One’s modest villa. Many of my fellow supplicants were representatives of organizations similar to but much grander than ‘the “Prism”’, and I heard the usual sly remarks about swings and hammocks and treetop dens. My clothes were creased from successive nights on packed buses, and I would have dearly liked a minute alone with a cloth and a faucet. Overall, my confidence was far from high. I had, as it were, auditioned CRs/G,C (it did not yet bear the ‘UU’ imprimatur) before the thinkers of ‘Hut A’, and it was greeted without the slightest sign of enthusiasm, to put it mildly; it was greeted, in fact, with chilled dismay and then outright mockery. I also had an unpleasant suspicion that ‘Truqbom’ had intervened on my behalf in a facetious spirit, to bring upon me not only much trouble and expense but also humiliation and perhaps even punishment. Despite all this, I cherished the hope that the One Eyed One would somehow grasp the wayward, the vaulting genius of CRs/G,C.
Once I got inside it was possible to watch the petitioners as they took their leave of the fabled chamber. You could see them backing away, and then turning towards the open front doors. Some came out looking almost farcically gratified; some (I counted nine) seemed utterly crushed — and two of them were promptly marched off by the guards. The overwhelming majority, admittedly, were neither happy nor sad: they were merely caricatures of bafflement. But by this time I had a near-irresistible desire to bolt: I could feel my body trying to do it, trying to burst away from itself and be gone. My turn came and I stumbled in.
The warrior poet lay half-submerged by the heaped cushions, an imposing figure in his dishdash and his flip-flops. I found it difficult to return his one-eyed gaze, and during my presentation I looked elsewhere, at the rugs, the tea tray, the large tin box brimming with US dollars. When I eventually fell silent and straightened my neck, Mullah Omar said slowly,
‘Answer me this. What should we do with the buggerers? Some scholars say they should be thrown from a high roof. Others maintain that these sinners should be buried in a hole and a wall should be toppled on them. Which?’
I said with hesitation, ‘The hole and the wall sounds more unnatural, and thus more pious, my Leader.’
And I saw that he was smiling at me. A strange smile, combining serenity and severity. Perhaps this is the way God smiles.
I returned to the north-east in a two-door Datsun pickup. Brashly I sounded the horn, and watched the unloading of my recent purchases (the water purifier, the battery-operated refrigerator), suitably impressing my wives.
UU: CRs/G,C? It’s simple. We’re going to scour all the prisons and madhouses for every compulsive rapist in the country, and then unleash them on Greeley, Colorado.
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