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Jihad

My name is Jihad Rashoon. I was born in the ghost of a fungus. When they took off the bandages I expected to be able to see. I just started laughing instead. Darkness. Blackness. I’m on a campaign to give up stimulants. I do drink alcohol if I go out. I don’t go out often. I’ve been fucked without love but never without rhythm. My philosophy is, I have no philosophy. I used to have rape fantasies about John Travolta when I was fifteen. I had my nose pierced in Camden Town. “This is not going to hurt you.” “Eina!” When they took off the bandages I expected to be able to hear. I just started crying instead. Silence. Blackness. Music is not the same as sound. I’m very interested in alternative medicine. My mother’s name was Madiya. I’ve always thought it odd and apposite that the first three letters spelled Mad. She wore pink crimpeline dresses. Had pseudo seizures all the time. A huge muslim woman with a hectic stutter. I’ve never seen anyone’s mouth move so fast. Her birthday was January 13. She slit her wrists on the 12th. The day before she was born. I appreciated the irony of that. She had a wicked sense of humour. When she wasn’t depressed. She was mostly depressed. I started my campaign to give up stimulants after the funeral. I stopped reading when I was twelve. The first book I enjoyed was Savages. Shirley Conran. Mom used to smoke Camel Lights. She was a Capricorn Monkey.

My name is Jihad Rashoon. I’m not a man. Basically I’m a blank page. My father never had a father. He put a curse on me when I was seven years old. For which he was sentenced to ten years in Umkhonto We Sizwe. I’ve been going in for trauma debriefing every Wednesday afternoon since the funeral. They’ve decided to send me in to Pagad for exorcism next week. Alcohol causes a lot of the world’s problems. Lack of alcohol causes even more. Revenge is what the whole fucken world runs on. Rohypnol only works nicely when it’s done in combination with alcohol. Otherwise you just fall asleep. My problem with drugs is drug culture. I did coke once. To belong. Someone slipped me a nexus at a rave. I got very frenetic. Drank too much. Didn’t know what was going on. The first time I took LSD I was nine. It felt really safe. When they took off the bandages I expected to be able to speak. Fuck reconciliation. Basically Jihad is always the best approach. Doctor Beckett told me to write down everything that seems appropriate or important. She has nice tits. Big. I would like to call her by her first name. Mickey. She told me that would be inappropriate. I’m sometimes confused by the regulations. But there isn’t really any sense in complaining. They only end up using it against you. It’s hard not to focus on her tits when she sits opposite me. Tits that big are incongruous with being a doctor. I don't think she realises how untherapeutic her presence is.

My mother Madiya Rashoon used to tell me that she could mix with beggars and kings. Unfortunately it was her lot to only ever meet beggars. It used to irritate and embarrass me when her accent would change depending on who she was talking to. Nowadays I do the same. My voice is a virus that infects my body. How often I prayed for Madiya to die! I felt no greater emotion as a child than hatred for Allah because of his steadfast refusal to answer my daily petition and rid me of that blighted woman. In time I ceased to believe in Allah’s existence and replaced in my heart my hatred of deity with my hatred for her. My dad is a used beret salesman. He always says, “everything is a miracle! Look in the mirror, that’s a miracle!” When Madiya got Judge Steyn to raise the monthly maintenance amount he took dad aside and whispered, “I’m sorry to tell you Mr. Rashoon but you are the victim of legal blackmail.” It’s not that Dad hates me, it’s just that he wished I’d never been born. When I asked him what the meaning of life was he said, “I believe in not believing. I believe in no-thing.” It sort of made sense. We all have to believe in something. Not believing is something too. In the same way that nothing is something. We just don’t know what. Quite frankly I don’t care. This thing about communication is a lot of horse-shit. Action, that’s what counts. Action.

When my Dad saw Madiya standing in the kitchen with the carving knife he unbuttoned his shirt, exposed his paunch and his minimal patch of chest hair tangled about his sagging breasts and he barked at her, “If you want to stab, STAB!” Then she went into the bathroom. He and I sat together for a long while in front of the tv with the sound on mute, watching the cricket and listening to her screams. The tv numbed us. Like always. It numbed us so much we didn’t even know we were bored. It was hours and hours later that she stopped making noises. Stopped working that infernal mouth of hers. The cricket was over. The late night news was over. There was just snow swirling on the screen. Dad and I sat in the strangely glowing space lit only by the luminosity of the tv screen. Silent and semi-somnolent we looked like sculptural deities, Bodhisattva and Vaisravana, the Lung Men of China. We were both beyond pity. We simply didn’t care anymore. Madiya had gone under in order for us to go over.

Dr. Beckett wants me to be more explicit about the games.

I want to call her Mickey.

Everybody wants something.

She has nice tits.

Big.

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