FUNKYWORLD: CHAPTER 1

PART I

CHAPTER 1

Sometime in the often cited not-too-distant future…

Elvis Presley—the ’68 comeback special version, replete with black-leather ensemble—swung a roundhouse at Ramona Funk. Ramona ducked, grabbing Elvis’s ankle as it passed over her head. She gave it just enough push to put the swarthy (and surprisingly svelte) King of Rock and Roll off balance. Before falling, however, Elvis managed to shoot the opposite leg forward, rallying his momentum into a twisting grand jete, capping that off with a quick, spinning pike.

He landed in a squat, his fist to the ground, one leg thrust straight out to the side. It was a pose that Ramona would put in a category somewhere between Spider-Man and Playmate of the Year.

It was quite a finish, and she was impressed. She complimented her foe, saying, “Not bad, Elvis.”

Elvis looked up at her with his angry, rock-and-roll eyes. It was possible, Ramona guessed, that this was his wind up prior to “busting out” with his famous rendition of “C.C. Ryder.” At this point, Ramona thought, anything was possible.

But there was no invisible Buddy Rich to play his invisible drums to cue an invisible band to bring Elvis onstage strutting and singing. Elvis was breathing hard, his sweat glinting purple as it mixed with his cheap hair dye.

“Baby,” he snarled, “You gonna die!”

So much for getting my rockabilly groove on, Ramona thought.

“No worries, sweet cakes,” she told Elvis. “I been dead already.”

“Yeah?” he retorted. “Me too!”

Ramona cocked her head toward the now crouching, sidestepping Elvis as they circled one another. “Kinda takes the edge off, huh?”

“Take the edge off-ah this, bitch!”

With a speed remarkable even for the satanic foot soldier he had become, he lunged at Ramona. But Ramona was already in the air, having sprung straight up and into a forward somersault.

She came down in time to give Elvis an elbow to the back as he whooshed past. The blow was timed perfectly to take full advantage of his forward momentum and send him sailing into the Jungle Room. He slammed into the wall next to the fireplace, smashing the various porcelain mantle trinkets, and leaving an Elvis-shaped crater right next to the tiger-on-black-velvet painting. Various animal-skin wall hangings, dislodged by the Elvis impact, came drifting down on top of him.

Making a show of dusting her hands, Ramona stepped into the Jungle Room doorway, saying, “Now that just felt all kinds of good.”

Brushing the drywall from the shoulders of his leather jacket, Elvis rose up through the snow leopard spots and white tiger stripes. His upper lip curled and quivered with rage. Glaring at Ramona through the strands of stringy, jet-black hair hanging over his eyes, he said, “Okay, you’re good.”

Ramona gave a slight curtsey. “Thank you.”

Suddenly, the floor began to rumble.

A smile came to Elvis’s lips. Adopting an evangelistic tone, he announced, “Praise Billy, the pipeline is clear! The demons of hell are upon us, darlin’! They have traversed the globe to reach this most holy of places and suck the very soul from your flesh to be damned through all of eternity!”

Ramona laughed. “What the hell are you talking about?”

She whirled around as a thunderous crash rang out through the halls of the mansion. From the direction of the front foyer, she could hear the war cry of Beelzebub’s so-called Demon Horde.

Elvis strutted over to the fireplace mantle, leaned back against it, and struck his best James Dean-type pose. With a double-finger-pistol salute, he declared, “Get ready to be rent asunder, baby."

It was in that moment that the ultra-surreality of the situation hit Ramona with full force. Here she was inside Graceland Mansion, regarding the long-dead most-popular rock and roll star of all time, who was hell-bent (no pun intended) on sending her back to the outer rim of the Milky Way.

The Demon Horde’s wings flapped and fwished ever nearer until they rounded the corner and thundered down the hall toward the Jungle Room.

“Come on fellas!” Elvis cried zealously, “Let’s introduce her to the band!”

Ramona took a long, deep breath as she prepared to defend herself against the oncoming gaggle of flying, zombie-faced reptiles, all the while wondering:

How the hell did I get here?

  ¶ 7:32 AM 2 comments

  FUNKYWORLD: CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

Some time before the Elvis tussle…

My name is Michael. What follows is a detailed account of the events surrounding our implementation of what has been dubbed “The Ramona Solution,” from the evaluation phase to the present day. The account was written with the assistance of my counterpart, Gabriel, as culled from various surveillance sources located on the planet Earth.

The date was Feb. 20, 2008 (Earth time). The operations of Franchise Earth were being threatened by a former corporation employee named Beelzebub. Beelzebub had spent his time as an exile on Franchise Earth attempting to consolidate his power and it had become evident that his efforts were beginning to bear fruit. It was believed that he had acquired the capability to wipe out the entire population of the Earth, sparing only a very manageable few thousand human beings. This radical downsizing would result in the most massive (and most hostile) hostile takeover in the corporation’s history.

This is what our predictors (who are never wrong) foresaw. And we were banned from directly interfering. Because of this, those of us stationed at the Jehu Vai Outpost feared an imminent shutdown of operations.

And then, shortly after Universe, Inc. was swallowed up by the Incorporation Corporation (InCorp), a memo made our fate official: InCorp had determined that Franchise Earth would not meet the new company’s solvency standards and the Jehu Vai was set to be the latest casualty to downsizing. We were told to prepare for final auditing and asset liquidation. All of the outpost employees were reassigned, leaving only Gabriel and myself to assist the Corporate auditors and auctioneers.

The outlook for Franchise Earth was, to say the least, bleak.

That was when Ramona Funk caught my eye. While we were helpless to stop the forces that would destroy the Earth, she was not. And it was serendipitous that she chose to abandon her life’s work and return to the United States of America during our darkest hour.

She was thirty-five years old by that time and had spent almost fifteen years operating as a deep cover antiterrorism operative in the planet’s Middle Eastern region. She had not notified her “non-CIA affiliated” employer of her decision to leave. Likewise, she had not told her handler—a man she knew only as “Jess.”

Ramona was driving on Interstate 240 in Memphis, Tennessee, looking for the Millbranch Road exit when she received the call from a more-than-a-little-angry Jess on her cell phone.

“I’ve heard,” he seethed, “That you got off a plane in Houston this morning.”

“That’s true,” Ramona replied.

“Would you like to tell me what the fuck is going on? Would you like to tell me where the fuck you’ve been?”

Ramona’s response was flat. “No. But I will tell you that I’ve quit.”

There was a long silence on the other end, followed by the sound of rustling papers. Finally, Jess said, “What makes you think you can just quit?”

“I didn’t think about it. I just did it.”

“Well, you better start thinking about it god damned double-quick. Do you know how many millions of dollars have been invested in you as an asset? Do you realize what kind of total bullshit this is?”

At this point, Ramona realized that she had missed her exit. She swore to herself, but her tone was cool as she said, “Sorry.”

“Sorry? Fucking sorry? Mother fucking holy god damned…” His voice trailed off into deep breathing exercises.

“What do you want me to say?” Ramona asked.

There was another long pause with no sound on the other end except Jess’s controlled exhalations. “Why?”

“Why?”

“Why? Why quit? Why now?”

“It’s a little complicated.”

“I think you’re going to find quitting infinitely more complicated than anything you could possibly imagine.”

A highway sign told Ramona she would have to drive 10 miles before coming to another exit where she could turn around.

God dammit—of all the times to get this pain-in-the-ass call…

Ramona heard Jess sigh heavily. Apparently attempting to adopt a more business-like tone, he commanded, “You need to come in to get debriefed. You need to come in now.”

“Nothing’s changed since my last debriefing.”

“Come in anyway. We should discuss this further and it’s crazy doing it on the phone.”

Now Ramona was annoyed. “I don’t think so.”

She heard a thud that she assumed was Jess’s fist coming down hard on his desk. “What do you think you’re going to do?” Jess asked, his voice so low now it was little more than a rasp. “Where do you think you can go?”

“I don’t suppose you could help me land a job translating Farsi for the CIA?”

“If you’re serious about that, fuck you and piss off. If you’re not serious, fuck off anyway. You’ll never work for the United States government. You’ll never work for anybody if I have anything to say about it. And when this gets out, the wheels will be in motion.”

“Take care,” Ramona warned her handler, “That you don’t get caught under those wheels.”

“My ass is in good hands. You worry about your own pretty little caboose.”

Half disgusted, Ramona retorted, “I’ll do that. Anything else?”

“Yes. Before you start feeling too smug, keep this in mind: approximately 4 percent of your brain belongs to the government of the United States of America.”

This amused Ramona. “I thought possession was nine-tenths of the law.”

“You’re right. So let’s say you walk out onto the road and get hit by a bus. Do you think we’re going to allow that 4 percent of your brain to fall in the hands of some county coroner?”

Ramona was no longer amused.

These crazy mothers just might come after me, after all, she thought.

Glibly, Jess observed, “Not so quick with the smart-ass comebacks all of a sudden, eh?”

Ramona kept the cell phone to her ear, her eyes on the road. A sign told her that she was now seven miles from her intended detour exit. After taking a moment to distill the possible scenarios, she concluded that Jess was unlikely to follow through with his threats. The variables were too numerous and wild for the agency to take that kind of chance. The agency (which, again, was not affiliated with the CIA) was all about low exposure. Leaving her be was the only possible insurance they had of maintaining that status.

“Jess?”

“Yes?”

“Go fuck yourself.” With that, she took the cell phone and threw it out the window of her rental car. In her rearview mirror, she watched it hit the pavement of Interstate 240, before getting crushed beneath the wheels of a pickup truck. Then it was gone.

Ramona knew it was foolish to think of the telephone as her last tie to the “non-CIA affiliated” agency that had been the center of her life for the last 15 or so years (including five years of training). Nonetheless, that was how she felt. She told herself that the only thing she had to worry about was the future. However, while she had displayed an impressive proficiency for lying to other people in life or death situations, even she knew deep down how appallingly inept she was at lying to herself.

What will I do with myself? She asked herself.

She wondered how the skills she had spent so many years developing would transmute themselves to the so-called “real world.” She imagined her resume, where under “experience” one might read, “World-traveled; Multi-lingual; Infiltrated and disrupted terrorist organizations at home and abroad; assassinated leaders and prominent members of terrorist organizations; displayed proficiency with various explosives and military ordinance.”

These were the things Ramona knew she could do well. But in the last two years or so it had become apparent to her that for all the bodies she was piling up, she was doing nothing to chisel away at the superstructures that ensured the uninterrupted flow of terror throughout the world. The policies of the current Washington regime were inspiring an entire generation of recruits for every militant terrorist group in the world. And this put her in danger.

So whatever the future held for the Middle East and Eastern Asia, Ramona didn’t want any part of it. She had put in 10 years as a fully autonomous agent and she had spent the better part of that time feeling invincible. Or at least, she had given little thought to dying. Since 9/11, however, it seemed that mindset had reversed itself and death loomed as a potential self-fulfilling prophecy with each assignment. Most of the agents who had trained with her were dead now, after all—possibly all of them, she surmised. The politicians would say they died for their country “in the line of duty.” But Ramona had concluded that she didn’t want to die for a country she didn’t know anything about anymore. A very specific, sleepy malaise had been creeping up on her over the past few years—something she couldn’t quite seem to identify. She found herself increasingly prone to ruminations on life and death and what was beyond. She had concluded that she had nothing to look forward to once she was shut down. She had long ago disavowed her belief in any sort of soul or anything beyond the cerebral cortex. But until recently, such conclusions hadn’t mattered much to her.

Am I actually afraid of dying? she wondered.

After pondering the question for a moment or two, she made a conscious effort to shrug it off. It didn’t matter, she concluded, if she was afraid of dying. She knew that she was not afraid of living—and that was the more relevant subject.

But she had no idea what sort of life she would be able to make for herself in the country she had spent the last ten years fighting for. The ideals of God and country had been the central driving force in her life for as long as she could remember. But it had been years since she last considered God as anything close to real, and even longer since she’d actually set foot in the U.S.

She had had made a confession when she was 18 years old—shortly after returning home from her first trip to Europe. She had felt coerced into doing it at the time by her trainers, who made it quite clear to everyone in her training group that America had no need of and little tolerance for atheist foot soldiers.

She had not revisited the altar of self-flagellation since. Likewise, she had not given any sort of church offerings—just as she had never paid federal income taxes, FICA, or Social Security. (She had never been issued a Social Security number, for that matter.) She was compensated for her duties via direct deposit into a Swiss bank account under the name Katherine Jones. The depositor was a German holding company operating out of Central America.

The bank account in Switzerland was the only one she’d ever had. The non-CIA affiliated agency was the only employer she’d ever worked for—and even it maintained a state of plausible deniability regarding both her service and its own existence.

But there was enough in her bank account now that she could live off of the interest for the rest of her life. And no one could touch it but her. She supposed that with a few wise investments under her belt, she could live quite comfortably. But she was not naïve enough to expect any letters of recommendation from the government she had devoted half her life to.

“References: Available only in conjunction with a favorable expectation of plausible deniability.”

Nonetheless, she found the uncertainty of her future oddly comforting, somehow. She fantasized a life not dominated by the sights of death and the smell of sulfur.

As she turned off Interstate 240 onto Millbranch Road, for no good reason at all, she was reminded of Kaliq. She remembered how young and handsome he was. She remembered how he was constantly ridiculed within their group for being unable to grow a full beard. And yet Kaliq seemed incapable of embarrassment or shame. She recalled how impressed she was that, even with such challenges to his manhood (regardless of how jocular) Kaliq was the only one among them who insisted upon wearing shorts. They were long shorts, just past the knee, and with his combat boots, he exposed nothing but a small section of shin. But it was a boldly smooth and hairless shin. When night fell in their desert camp just over the dunes from the West Bank, he donned his heavy coat like everyone else to guard against the cold. But he always wore shorts.

“My lower body does not get cold,” he insisted when pressed.

Kaliq was being tutored on how to make a crude, methane-based explosive when the compound he was mixing blew him and six other members of the group to shit. Kaliq was 23 years old. Ramona admitted to being a little in love with him only after he was dead. If she had owned up to her feelings before then, she might have found it difficult to blow him up.

No one in that Palestinian group was hyper-religious—otherwise, the presence of a woman in the group would not have been tolerated. Ramona found them to be thoughtful, philosophical people who honestly felt they had nothing better to do with their lives than fight for what they believed was a just cause. They were convinced that their tactics were dictated by repression and maltreatment. They reasoned that their inhumanity was a " w:st="on">response to being regarded for so long by the Israelis as less than human.

Ramona not only understood their outlook, she sympathized with it. She had to. She was one of them. At least, she was one of them until she killed them. And then it was on to the next group. Ironically, her efficiency at wiping out so many terrorist factions actually boosted her reputation around the network as the toughest woman in the region. The network at that time was so paranoid that the CIA was lurking around every corner, they were blind to Ramona’s treachery. She didn’t fit the CIA profile, after all. She was not born to wealth, had not graduated from an ivy-league college, and she was black. CIA agents were culled almost exclusively from America’s most privileged class and were almost uniformly white males. The group that trained Ramona and sent her overseas was counting on that widely held perception to get her inside. Even so, Ramona was still the only African-American in her training class, and only one of two women.

And I’m the only one left alive…

Ramona had killed a lot of people, and she did not torture herself over whether or not they deserved it. She knew they all deserved it. But she had learned that one could develop affection for even the most insane, ignorant son of a bitch on the planet after living with him under brutal conditions for a long stretch of time.

But Kaliq was not insane or ignorant. He was intelligent, personable, and funny. She recalled the hilarious stories Kaliq told about his father’s obsessive quest to shore up the roof of their two-room cinder-block home against leaks. This was in a place where rain was, as Kaliq put it, “almost as rare a thing as peace and justice.”

Kaliq’s father, who the last Ramona heard was still living in a village near Bir Zeit, had no idea that his son had dedicated himself to recruiting suicide bombers. Kaliq had never told him because Kaliq knew that his father would not have approved. So Kaliq’s father would never know why his son had been killed. This was just one of many pangs of never-to-be-finished business that made it difficult for Ramona to sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time. But she was glad Kaliq was dead.

And she missed Kaliq very much.

Thoughts like these further convinced Ramona that she needed to make a significant change in her life.

Fifteen minutes after her telephone conversation with Jess, Ramona finally found Millbranch Road. This was the main thoroughfare for a mostly industrial area in the eastern part of the city. One end of the road ramped right onto I-240, the other end came to a dead stop at Memphis International Airport.

Ramona turned off Millbranch and pulled up to a fairly well-kept steel prefab building with a sign reading, PROFESSIONAL A&V. Ramona entered through a glass door into a small reception area. There was a young Middle-Eastern man wearing a dingy T-shirt sitting behind a glass window. The man slid the window open and asked, “May I help you?”

The man was in his early 20’s—very slim, with a long, crooked nose. Ramona was surprised to hear his heavy, Farsi accent. In Farsi, she replied, “I’m looking for Moukib. I’m an old friend.”

The young man smiled broadly. Ramona suddenly got the feeling she had seen him before.

Apparently eager to converse in his native tongue, he said, “Hello! Yes, he’s in the editing room. I’ll get him.”

“I’d like to surprise him, please.”

The man nodded. “Yes, yes, certainly.” He pressed a button. “Down the hall and go right.”

Ramona passed through a door as a buzzer sounded. She walked down a long, narrow hallway that smelled of musty, industrial-grade carpeting. She came to a doorway leading into a darkened room. There she found Moukib sitting in front of a digital video editing station, staring up at one of three video monitors. It was running video of a naked woman writhing and moaning in apparent ecstasy. She was being serviced by the man holding the camera.

With Moukib unaware of her presence, Ramona leaned against the doorsill and watched until the man reached his climax in the most degrading manner possible for the woman. With a fade, it was revealed that the couple were in some kind of utility closet. The man threw the woman’s clothes at her and ordered her out. He too spoke with a heavy Farsi accent. The woman cursed the man who just a moment before was privy to her most intimate areas. In " w:st="on">response, the man pushed her out of the door. She continued to swear at him from the hallway as he slammed the door in her face.

“So,” Ramona said in English, “This is how you have chosen to make a contribution here in the states, eh?”

Startled, Moukib whirled around. After squinting for a moment at the dark figure in the doorway, he exclaimed, “Oh my God!” The former PLO strongman and personal bodyguard to Yasser Arafat embraced Ramona heartily. “I thought you were dead. I knew you were dead. I knew you had to be dead.”

Standing six feet tall, Moukib was a good three inches taller than Ramona, and a great deal wider. “Your English is excellent,” she observed, her cheek pressed uncomfortably against his sternum.

Moukib spoke Arabic in the il-Xalil dialect, and the last time Ramona had seen him (some five years or more ago) it had been very prominent—turning all of his “r” sounds to “l” sounds, for instance. Now, however, while his accent was distinct, it was not nearly as pervasive, and his “r” sounds were proper.

“I work on it every day! If you wait another five years to see me, you might think I’m just a regular American!” Moukib slapped his hands to Ramona’s shoulders and held her at arm’s length. “You are still one smoking babe!” He lowered his eyes, shamelessly examining her chest. “Did you get your boobs done?” Receiving only a flat stare from Ramona in response, he held his hands up apologetically. “Forgive me! Must be the sweater! What are you doing here?”

Ramona nodded toward the video monitor. “What are you doing?”

Moukib grinned mischievously. “What have I always told you? You Americans think Arabs hate America, but we do not. We love America as much as we love to drink and watch porn. Over there we go to prison for it. But in America, not only can we enjoy porn, we can turn it into a very thriving business!”

“We?”

“Well… me.”

Ramona shook her head. “You may still get put in prison for it.”

Moukib shrugged, the smile disappearing from his face. “What? Why?”

“You can’t shoot that stuff in Tennessee.”

Moukib shook his head. “No, no—a friend shoots in L.A. That’s him in the video. Anyway, he sends it here. I edit, make copies, and ship it out. Memphis, Tennessee—distribution center of America! I take the orders off of the internet and walk them over to UPS. They have a hub right down the alley.” He reached over to one of the metal shelves next to the editing station and retrieved a DVD box. Handing it to Ramona, he beamed, “That’s the product.”

Ramona read the title on the box aloud. “Broom Closet Bitches, Volume Eleven.”

Moukib gestured toward the video monitor. “Working on volume 12 right now!”

Ramona handed the box back to Moukib. “Quite the epic.”

Moukib laughed. “I tell you, I can’t print enough of them.”

“So business is good, then?”

Ramona stepped out into the hallway as Moukib shut down his equipment and slipped on the suede jacket that had been hanging over the back of his chair. “I am making an ass load, let me tell you!”

“I don’t suppose it bothers you that it’s totally degrading to women. Not that I want to sound like a cliché.”

“Degrading?” Moukib stepped out into the hall, closed the door to his editing room, and locked it. “No, no, it’s all acting. After the money shot, Mo—that’s my friend—pretends that he’s not going to pay and the girl pretends to get pissed off.”

Ramona smiled. “I stand corrected.”

The irony of Ramona’s statement was apparently lost on her old friend. “How about supper?” he proposed. “I’m starving!”

Ramona gave Moukib’s burgeoning stomach a pat and replied, “You don’t look like you’ve missed too many meals.” Ramona stopped Moukib before they reached the reception area. Nodding toward the door, she asked in a low voice, “Who’s your receptionist?”

“Who—Fadil? A friend’s cousin. He’s my assistant, not my receptionist.”

“How long have you known him?”

Moukib shrugged. “He’s worked for me for a year now. What’s the problem?”

Ramona shook her head and replied, “Nothing. He’s Farsi.”

Moukib lowered his chin at Ramona. “Yes, and so…?”

“So… nothing.”

Moukib wagged his finger at Ramona, whispering now. “When do you stop thinking everyone’s a terrorist?”

Ramona rolled her eyes. “I don’t think everyone’s a terrorist. There’s just something familiar about him, is all. Where’s he from?”

“He lived in Iran before coming here.” He narrowed his eyes at his old friend. “I suppose that makes him a suspect?”

Ramona nodded. Since she had never been to Iran, she determined to let it drop for now. “No,” she lied, “He’s not a suspect.”

“Good. Now, can we go and eat with my friends, or are you going to embarrass me?”

Ramona gave Moukib half a grin. “Embarrass you?”

“Yes. Are you going to assume that everyone is Jihadim?”

“Give me a break, Moukib. You know the kind of circles I’ve been running in. Besides you and a very few others, for the last 10 years it was only a " w:st="on">surprise to run into someone who wasn’t a terrorist.”

Moukib opened the door for her and said in a tone too low for Fadil to hear, “Well, when you live in the nuthouse, you’re likely to keep the company of nuts, right?”

Ramona glanced back at Moukib as she passed through the doorway. She felt warm and safe for the first time since so long ago that for all she knew it might have been the first time ever.

Outside, Moukib took one look at Ramona’s rented Ford Probe and said, “Feh. I’ll drive.”

“Okay, but I can’t leave my cases here.”

Moukib nodded. “Load them up in my truck. Plenty of room.” Moukib’s truck was a six-year-old Nissan Pathfinder. Ramona took the two steel cases out of the trunk of the Probe. Moukib offered to carry them, but Ramona refused. Moukib opened the back of the Pathfinder and she loaded them in. “That’s all?” the former Yasser Arafat confidante asked as he bullied his way into the driver’s seat, which was just barely large enough to accommodate him.

“Yup.”

“You travel light.”

“I only take what I need.” As she climbed into the vehicle, she remarked, “I expected something flashier from a hot shot porn entrepreneur.”

Moukib wrinkled his nose. “What? And fuck around with the financing? All the interest—it’s fucking sinful.” He gave the dashboard a not-too-gentle rap. “Nissan—built to last, and all paid for!”

They got back onto I-240. They traveled for some time before they were in sight of the Union Avenue exit. At this point, Ramona looked up and spied a billboard. A silhouette of the iconic Memphis resident and iconic “King of Rock and Roll,” Elvis Presley, was framed against a red backdrop. Above his slightly disheveled pompadour, bold yellow letters proclaimed, ELVIS LIVES!

Ramona smiled to herself. “I need to go to Graceland,” she told Moukib.

Moukib raised an eyebrow. “You’re an Elvis fan?”

“I don’t know. I guess so. I know a lot of his songs.”

“Well, I’m you can’t tour Graceland anymore.”

“Really? Why not?”

Moukib shrugged. “His daughter sold off a huge chunk of the estate to some corporation. They’ve got the place closed down for weeks now. It was a big story around here.”

Once they had wound their way off of the exit ramp, Moukib changed his mind about going downtown and instead headed back toward the Mid Town area. “That reminds me, though,” he explained, “You should meet my friends,” he explained.

“Are your friends Elvis fans?”

Moukib thought about that for a moment. “Yes, they are. In fact, everybody I’ve met since coming here—everybody, that is, who is not from here—they’re all Elvis fans. It’s like Elvis and America are practically the same thing.”

“Lots of Elvis fans in Gaza,” Ramona said.

“Lots of Elvis fans in Palestine. I don’t know. He doesn’t do anything for me.” As they drove, Ramona regarded the buildings along Union Avenue, searching for anything familiar.

“So,” Moukib asked, “What brings you to Memphis, anyway?”

“You,” Ramona replied. “And I lived here when I was a little girl for a minute.”

“Ah, I’m sure it’s changed a lot since you lived here.”

Ramona shook her head. “I can’t remember much.”

They passed a small park with a statue of a man on a horse—something from the Civil War era. Ramona pointed to it. “I remember that.”

Moukib peered out of his window at the statue. “Ah, yes. Do you know who it is?”

“It’s Nathan Bedford Forrest.”

“Who’s that?”

“Founder of the Ku Klux Klan, among other things.”

Moukib was shocked. “They have a statue for the man who founded the KKK?”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Oh my God. What the hell? Who knew?”

Ramona laughed. “I don’t think it’s there because he founded the Klan. He was a general in the Civil War—an excellent tactician--” Ramona stopped herself. She realized she was quoting straight out of the American History Book she studied during training. The Nathan Bedford Forrest it presented was a general who was always the first to get into the fight up close and personal. He was a master of guerilla tactics and morale building. After the war, he formed the Ku Klux Klan as a group to defend otherwise defenseless Southerners during the lawlessness of Reconstruction. Supposedly, according to the book, he quit the group once he saw that it had become an instrument of racial hatred.

But none of that mattered to Ramona. Whether Nathan Bedford Forrest was a good man fighting for the wrong side was of no consequence. He was good at his job. There was a time when that was enough for Ramona. But she wasn’t so sure these days.

Moukib asked, “So you have personal memories about that statue?”

“Oddly enough,” Ramona said, “That statue is a big part of one of my very few childhood memories. My grandmother and I were staying somewhere around here while my mother was—“ Ramona was unable to finish the sentence only because she could not recall exactly what was going on with her mother at the time. The only thing Ramona could remember was that her mother was gone for a while. And then Ramona went to Mississippi to live with her grandmother until the men from the government came and got her. “Anyway,” Ramona continued, “My grandmother and I were sitting in the park and she told me about the statue. She thought it was funny.”

“A black woman thought a statue of the founder of the KKK was funny?”

Ramona shrugged. “I don’t know. She laughed.” She leaned back in her seat. “That’s all I remember, I guess.”

And that was the other reason she had to come back to the states. How long, she wondered, can a person go on living with almost no childhood memories? They had taught her so much psychology at training camp—lessons she had more memorized than learned. But the meaning of those lessons was becoming clearer to her every day. And she now knew that the person she was now was as a direct result of what happened to her then.

On the other hand, she realized that she had no idea what kind of person she was now—not really. She had spent most of her life perfectly content to do as she was told. She was aware that she was only just now waking up to herself.

Moukib stopped at a corner convenience store. The sign above the store read, QUIK STOP-N-SHOP. Ramona thought Moukib was ducking in for cigarettes, so she did not get out of the car. Moukib got all the way to the door of the shop when he realized he’d left Ramona behind. He came back to the car, opened the door, and asked, “You coming?”

“What for?”

“We’re here!”

“Here?”

“Yes, come in!”

Ramona got out of the truck and followed Moukib. Before entering, Moukib cautioned Ramona to avoid mentioning his pornography venture to the owners of the shop. “These guys are my friends but they’re respectable,” he said. “Not scumbags like me.”

Inside, Ramona found the store hopelessly cluttered, which at first glance made it seem dirty. Upon closer inspection, however, she saw that the floors were spotless and the shelves, though crowded and disorganized, were free of dust. Likewise, the products on the shelves—snack foods, tobacco products, canned goods—looked as if they were regularly rotated. There was one full wall of coolers. The products occupying the spaces behind the glass doors there were diverse and neatly-arranged—beer, sodas, etc. The store was quite a contrast from the shops she’d seen in other parts of the world. Bare shelves, old, grimy food packages, and no refrigeration were the norms.

There were two men behind the cash register, both of apparent Middle-Eastern or Mediterranean descent. One was a tall and lanky 20-something with a bulbous nose and large, smiling eyes. The other was half the size of the smiling-eyed man. Ramona guessed he was in his 40’s. He sported a Frank Zappa-style moustache and goatee.

On the opposite end of the shop there appeared to be a space cleared out to make room for a tiny café, replete with three small, round tables. Beyond the tables was a short-order-type kitchen and another cash register. The man working that register was enormously fat and sported a thin moustache. He dabbed at his sweaty brow with paper napkins as he rang up customers. The line at the café portion of the shop was three-deep. Two other customers were checking out at the other end of the store with Frank Zappa.

Heedless of the customers, Moukib announced boisterously, “Everyone! Please meet my good friend, Ramona!”

Everyone, including some of the customers, smiled at Ramona and offered various greetings. Mortified, Ramona gave a wave and an awkward grin as she followed Moukib to the café area.

The fat man there spoke with an il-Xalil accent that was worse than Moukib’s ever was. “Whaddup my fliend,” he said to Moukib without diverting his attention from his money-handling. “Howal you doing? Long time no see.”

A plump black woman in her 40’s was standing at a massive grill situated next to the fat man’s cash register. She was tending to various items—burgers, mostly.

“Ramona,” Moukib said, placing one arm around her shoulders and gesturing toward the fat man with the other. Ramona noted that Moukib was careful to keep his palm turned toward the floor as he said, “This is Yusuf.”

Yusuf only glanced up at Ramona, but his tone seemed genuine as he said, “Velly good to meet you young lady.”

Moukib turned to the black woman. “And that is Yusuf’s wife, Soshanna.”

“Howdy,” Soshanna beamed.

Yusuf glanced at his watch. “I’m closing the kitchen in 10 minutes. You two will eat with us tonight?”

Moukib’s reply was robust. “Absolutely!” Turning to Ramona, he declared, “We’ll get you fatted up before long, don’t you worry!”

Ramona rolled her eyes. Moukib gestured to a table. Although the short-order counter seemed to do a brisk business, people were mostly taking their meals out of the store.

When they had taken their seats, Moukib lowered his voice, saying to Ramona, “So, what’s happened, anway?”

“What do you mean?”

Moukib wagged his finger at her. “You know what I mean.”

“I quit.”

Moukib’s eyes widened. “Can you do that?”

Ramona shrugged. “I did it.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“About what?”

“That they’ll… you know…” He leaned in closer. “Take you out.”

Ramona shook her head. “It’s not like leaving Arafat’s cabinet.”

Moukib rolled his eyes. “What, am I stupid? It’s me, here. I’ve had dealings with these people. I know a little about what they do. And I’ve read Woodward. And And I just finished reading Seven Days of the Condor.”

Ramona chuckled. “That’s a novel.”

Moukib raised a finger. “Based on fact.”

“Not based on fact.”

“Well, I read The Hunt for Red October.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ve never heard of The Hunt for Red October? Tom Clancy?”

“I’m not too hip on the newer stuff.”

Moukib looked at Ramona as if her head was spinning around. “New?! It’s got to be twenty years old if it’s a day! They made the movie when Alec Baldwin was thin!”

Ramona shook her head. “Sorry. I suppose I’ll just be opening up a new can of worms if I asked who the hell Alec Baldwin was?”

“You’ve been out in the wilderness too long. But you know what goes on with these people—you’re former employers, that is.” He placed his hands on his wide chest and, narrowing his eyes at Ramona, asked, “The D.C. sniper?”

Ramona couldn’t help but grin in anticipation of hearing Moukib’s latest conspiracy theory. “What about the D.C. sniper?”

“Linda Franklin, the FBI analyst that was killed at Home Depot?”

“Yeah, I remember,” Ramona said skeptically.

“She uncovered something.” With that, he folded his arms like a man who’s just captured his opponent’s queen in a chess game.

“Uncovered what?”

“What do you think?”

Ramona almost broke out laughing. “I don’t think anything. What do you think?”

Sighing impatiently, Moukib leaned forward and placed his palms on the table. “Well, exactly what she uncovered, I don’t know. But my guess is it had something to do with 9/11.”

Even more skeptical, Ramona’s response was, “Okay, so what does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, how do you take out an FBI analyst and not attract a lot of suspicion? How do you keep people from wondering why?”

Ramona got the gist of Moukib’s theory now. She found it hilarious, but she did not let on. “Let me get this straight. According to you, someone who wanted to kill Linda Franklin went around sniping random victims so that her death would appear to be just one in a series of senseless killings?”

“When you look at the big picture, it certainly seems suspicious.”

“So who was behind all of this?”

“You tell me.”

Ramona was suddenly reminded of having similarly frustrating conversations with Moukib when he was holed up in a Tel-Aviv hotel room all those years ago. It was, at the time, Moukib’s purgatory. Arafat wanted him dead, the Israelis wanted to put him in prison (even though he hadn’t done anything in the least illegal), and the U.S., as usual, was dragging its feet on intervening. “You’re the one proposing this conspiracy theory,” Ramona reminded her friend, “Why don’t you give me the facts?”

“No facts. At this point, it’s all conjecture.”

“Then what makes you believe it’s true?”

“I’m not saying I believe it’s true, I’m just saying that it’s very suspicious.”

Ramona put her head in her hands. “How did we get to talking about this?”

Moukib looked confused for a moment. “I don’t know. What were we talking about?”

Ramona chuckled.

Moukib snapped his fingers. “I remember what we were talking about. What makes you think they won’t take you out?”

Ramona leaned back in her chair and took a breath. After regarding Moukib for a moment, she asked, “Why would they do that?”

Moukib glanced around the shop. “I don’t know. Because of the things you know, maybe?”

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

“Exposure. Leaving me alone gives them the best odds for zero exposure.”

“But they don’t know that you might not start talking about… things.”

Since walking into the shop and observing Moukib’s behavior, Ramona had become very aware of how she positioned her palms. After only a short time away from the Middle East, hiding them had become something she actually had to think about. Over there, she never knew who might take offense at the sight of her palms. To Moukib, she said, “Nobody would care about what I know. Even if it came out, nobody would care.”

“What makes you think that?”

“There’s a war on, Mouke. Who’s gonna care, now, really?”

Moukib, of course, knew nothing about the only wild card in her equations. That was the non-brain part of her brain. But so what if she did have an accident? And what if the county coroner did end up scooping her brain out of her skull and placing it on a scale? Odds are, that coroner would never be able to tell the difference between her brain and a normal brain. Ramona was confident that Jess knew that as well as she did.

Then again, she also knew Jess to be a vindictive son of a bitch. If Jess wanted to get back at her for leaving him high and dry, he might be able to sell that scenario to the bureaucrats as a compelling reason to take her out. He would know that it was bullshit, of course, and the bureaucrats would likely recognize it as bullshit as well. But the bureaucrats might assume the bullshit scenario to be a cover for some actual cause for concern—which they would never want to know, even if it didn’t exist.

“So what are you going to do?” Moukib asked.

Lost in thought, Ramona heard the question without absorbing it. Finally, she snapped to, saying, “Well, I need a place to stay.”

“Stay with me.”

Ramona smiled. “No thanks.”

“No, no, we’d love to have you.”

“We?”

“Me and my girlfriend.”

“Got yourself a live-in, did ya?”

“Oh, yes, she’s my sweet baby.”

Ramona smiled and tried to sound grateful, but said, “I don’t think so.”

“Before you say no—just keep in your mind one word.” Leaning in very close now, he said in a low voice, “Threesome.”

Ramona rolled her eyes as Moukib chortled. “Do you see,” she asked, “how immersing yourself in that business of yours has skewed your perception of normality?”

Still shaking with laughter, Moukib replied, “Yes, yes, it’s terrible. I’m a dirty, shameful man.”

“So, let me guess—your girlfriend is a stripper?”

Moukib laughed harder now, almost falling out of his chair. “Yes!” he gasped, banging the table with his fist.

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