This story contains sexually explicit material.
Please e-mail comments to twalden4 at juno dot com with ASSTR in the subject line.
Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.
Assyrian Lamassu photo by Trjames. Some rights reserved.
Cuneiform photo by procsilas. Some rights reserved.
Minoan Fresco photo by cavorite. Some rights reserved.
Rumi quotes from The Essential Rumi pp 2 and 135. Copyright 1995 by Coleman Barks. All rights reserved.
Hafez quote from The Gift p 312. Copyright 1999 by Daniel Ladinsky. All rights reserved.

Technical note: A gasp is a rapid intake of breath. In this story, it also means a rapid expelling of breath, since it is close to the sound I mean. Sigh, grunt, groan, pant, and scream don't work.

Parveen's Harem

My father was not a wealthy man. He couldn't afford to keep a harem. My grandmother, mother, sister and I lived in the same part of the house as he and my brother. My sister and I shared a room with my grandmother, and my brother slept in my mother's room and had it to himself when my father fulfilled his obligation to her. My father was a devout Muslim, and this arrangement made him a little uneasy. He thought I spent too much time alone with my brother. It wasn't right. My brother took oud lessons, what the French called l'oud and the English called the lute, and he tried to teach me what he learned. One time when I was twelve my father got angry when he saw my brother adjusting my fingers on the fretboard. He said the contact was too intimate. Girls were only allowed contact with close family members, but sex is sex, whether it is with the boy next door or with a brother, uncle or father. Some of the girls at school hinted that such things actually happened, but I knew they didn't. If a man raped his daughter in America things might go on pretty much as before, but a Muslim knew that if he did such a thing he would have to kill her to restore his honor. Yet I was fortunate. I was able to attend and finish secondary school. Most girls didn't. I wanted to go to college. Although there were female engineers, doctors and lawyers in Iraq, my father thought higher education wasn't proper for a girl, but he decided to kill two birds with one stone by sending me to school in America, away from my brother. I wasn't submissive enough or light enough skinned to marry off easily. It helped that I got a scholarship, and he only had to pay for transportation. He sent me to a formerly Methodist college in Connecticut because he thought it would be safe. He didn't have a very good idea of Christianity there. He thought a religious school would be all homosexual priests and disciplinary nuns. But it was like Christianity at home. People who cared made of it something good and beautiful, those who didn't twisted it to their own purposes, and most just followed the outward form and otherwise ignored it. In that respect it was pretty much like Islam or any other religion. But America was amazing. It was all green wooded hills. I came from the desert. It wasn't like this.

Listen. Iraq is all flat stony plains, broad slow moving rivers, fields of barley and wheat, and groves of date palms, with bare mountains and rolling foothills in the north, and reedy marshes and mud flats near the gulf. There is grassy steppe to the west and more mountains to the east. It has its own beauty and majesty. It's a little bigger than California, but for all of Mesopotamia, which includes parts of Syria, Turkey and Iran but not the western part of Iraq, you'd have to add Arizona. The Sumerian people had been farming the southern plains forever. Their language is like no other, and no one knows where they came from. It might have been the Indus valley, but ultimately it was Africa, like everyone else. Around 3000 BC they began building what became a large and complex system of irrigation canals and reservoirs. The necessary cooperation for this required organization and cities, and the increased food supply allowed them to be built. The local building materials were clay and reeds. Surplus grain was traded for wood, stone, and metal, which had to be imported from the surrounding highlands. Barley, wheat and dates were the staple crops. They also grew pomegranates, figs, chickpeas, cucumbers, onions, garlic, leeks, cumin and sesame. They grazed goats, sheep and cattle on barren land and fallow fields, and fished in their waterways. Droughts and famine were frequent, and periodic floods carried off their crops, livestock, possessions, and houses, so using a reed basket for a cradle was not a bad idea. They invented city states (with a hierarchy of priests, soldiers, craftsmen and farmers) along with numbers (grouped by ten and sixty), time (divided into hours and minutes), writing (with wedges and strokes), and record keeping (on clay tablets).

The first great Sumerian city was Uruk, on the lower Euphrates. It was formed when two nearby towns absorbed each other and thus had two chief gods, Anu, god of heaven and First God (prototype via Crete of Zeus, and also of the God of Abraham), and Innana, goddess of love and war and Queen of Heaven (prototype of Isis, Aphrodite, Athena and Artemis), whose symbols were an owl and a snake or dragon. Her son and consort was the shepherd king and dying god Dumuzi (prototype of Osiris, Abel, Adonis, Dionysus and Persephone, and also of Jesus, whose mother and companion were both Mary). To the north was the city of Nippur, sacred to Enlil, god of air and storm. He separated the sexual union of heaven and earth, Anu and Ki (prototype of Gaia), so he could create the world in the space between, as on the second day of creation. This act of divine coitus interruptus would explain why God didn't call the second day good. Enlil gave men the pickaxe, which enabled them to plant fields and build cities, and also the earliest known code of laws, which brought order and was based on an eye for an eye.

To the south was Eridu, built where marsh, plain and desert met, the oldest city. It later rose to prominence and was sacred to Enki, god of water and earth and life, a wisdom and trickster god, third and last of the great gods, and about whom there are the most stories. His symbols were a goat and a fish, later combined in the constellation Capricorn. He created the fertilizing Tigris River from his mighty cum. When the gods are threatened for being noisy and disruptive, Enki traps Abzu, a fresh water god of the upper gulf and First Begetter (prototype of the Abyss and the Deep), in the irrigation canals to water the fields and makes his body into a watery underground house beneath the city. When his wife Taimat, a salt water chaos dragon goddess of the lower gulf and Mother of the Gods (prototype of Python and the Midgard Serpent), seeks revenge, Enki goes to sleep in his new house. So Enlil fights and kills her, winning the title Father of the Gods by freeing the unborn gods inside her, and makes the sky from her ribs and the Milky Way from her tail. Enki wakes up and makes men from earth and blood to plant and harvest food for the gods. When men are threatened for being noisy and disruptive, Enki warns them of the drought, famine and plague sent by Enlil. Having failed three times, Enlil makes the gods promise not to tell men of the deluge. But Enki tells a wall, and Utnapishtim hears and follows the instructions to tear down his house and build it into a reed boat to save a remnant, for which he is rewarded with eternal life.

To the east and near the Tigris was the large city of Lagash, sacred to Ninurta, a mighty hunting and farming god (prototype of Nimrod, Kronos and Herakles, also known as Hercules), who carried a bow and arrow or a sickle. His symbol was a winged lion, and he was lord of the South Wind, which he inherited from his mother. North of ancient Eridu and near the Euphrates was Ur, the last great Sumerian city, sacred to Sin, the moon god, who controlled the months and read the destiny of all beings. He was conceived after Enlil saw the goddess Ninlil bathing in the stream. He propositions her, but she says her vagina is too small and knows nothing of sex, so while she is out sailing he rapes her, for which he is banished by the other gods to the underworld. Ninlil follows, but Enlil wants his son to live in the sky, not the underworld, so he changes into the gatekeeper, rivermaster, and ferryman and impregnates Ninlil with three more children, with which he ransoms Sin, and apparently himself.

The university in America that I attended was was on a hill above a small city on a large river and had grass and trees and large buildings. Two blocks away near the bottom of the hill was a street with a nice bookstore and a library built of brown stone. The main street was one block farther and had an old casual clothing store with an uneven wooden floor, a large toy store, a falafel restaurant, an Italian bakery with broccoli filled pizza, a Tibetan restaurant, and a diner that was open at odd hours. At the other end of town was a strip mall and lots of churches. The riverfront was across four lanes of freeway and not usable or easily accessible. At first it felt strange walking to class by myself. In Iraq women and girls never go anywhere alone. I had always walked to and from school with friends. Unlike America there wasn't much rape since women didn't go out by themselves, and since the attacker generally had to marry his victim. It was mostly used by the truly desperate to find wives, which was why it was looked upon with a certain sympathy by men.

Since I was nine I had prayed, except when I was having my period, five times a day. During morning twilight before sunrise, after true noon, after mid afternoon, after sunset, and after evening twilight. I continued to do so when I could, but class schedules were not designed to allow for this. I calculated the proper times from the sunrise and sunset tables in my almanac. Fasting every year for the twenty nine or thirty days of Ramadan basically meant skipping lunch. I got up to eat and pray before sunrise and broke my fast after sunset. The hardest part was not drinking water during the day, but humans had evolved on the plains of Africa and require water only once every twenty four hours. I drank extra in the morning and peed as often as I needed to. One is exempt from fasting when sick and, unlike many, I took advantage of that fact when I needed to, even if I still went to classes. Not being able to have sex during the day didn't affect me much. Some would have said that since I often skipped prayer and didn't make it up later I was no longer a Muslim. I wouldn't argue with them, but I still thought of myself as a believer.

Western clothing is bizarre. Tight clothing and skimpy swimsuits are designed display women's attributes, but baggy pants and oversized swimsuits hide those of boys. Boys are the ones doing the shopping. They are still in control, they just go about it differently. Even women who don't intend to show off their bodies end up doing so because of the fashions. And bras are strange. By pushing the breasts up and out to make them bigger they are designed for display, but by holding them tight so they will jiggle less they are designed for modesty. Perhaps it came from playing with Barbie dolls. I didn't want to display myself, but modesty is a relative thing. I wore jeans that weren't too tight, a loose fitting top, and a headscarf. I decided I didn't need to wear my headscarf so it covered my neck. Boys could see I didn't have an Adam's apple, but when I spoke my voice revealed the same thing. I could wear bikini briefs because boys didn't see them. In the pool I wore a one piece suit with relatively good coverage. Muslim women aren't supposed to wear swim suits, but I wasn't going to go naked. I had never had the chance to swim before and I liked it, something about the freedom of movement in every direction while being held and supported by the cool embrace of the water. And the changing room was the closest thing they had here to a harem. American women were shy, unlike what I was used to. In Iraq women didn't dress to display themselves to boys and show off to other women, but they don't hide their bodies from each other in private either. Here most of them held a towel in front or wrapped themselves in one, but I could see them in the shower. Some shaved, a few had a sprawling black thicket that had never known a razor, but most were trimmed and shaped into a strip, triangle, arc, diamond, or other odd configuration. At first I had to be careful not to stare. I was smooth like a nut.

Listen. Although their various fortunes rose and fell, there were said to be twelve postdiluvian cities at any one time in the land of Sumer. To the north of Nippur and south of Akkad was the Semitic city of Kish. Agga of Kish attacked Gilgamesh of Uruk and was defeated, after which different Sumerian cities ruled Kish at different times. The Sumerian city states fought each other for several centuries but were never united. The Semitic speaking people on the river plain to the north absorbed their culture, arts and myths, and in 2334 BC Sargon of Akkad conquered them. This was the confusion of languages credited to Enki and mentioned in the story of the Tower of Babel. It didn't stop ziggurat building, which was continued by the Akkadians and others. Early temples in Sumer were built at or near ground level, some with forecourts and naves in special areas, some looking not much different from the houses that surrounded them. Then they were built on platforms. New temples were built on top of old, and since those in charge like to take the high ground, and there wasn't any, they continued to add tiers and build upward toward heaven until the shrines of the patron deity were perched at the top of stepped pyramids. Only the priests were allowed into these temples, to feed to gods and perform the rituals on which the city and fields depended. The priests had a warrior class to protect the city and maintain order, but since the church had separated itself from the state, the soldiers completed this separation of powers and set themselves up in their own palaces as kings who answered directly to god, and were only nominally under the priests. These powers of fruitfulness and conflict had been united in the goddess Inanna, which was the reason for the unlikely pairing of Aphrodite and Ares.

There is an old story that the gods became fearful of one of these kings. Gilgamesh was king of Uruk, and he fortified the city and had sex with brides so that they might bear heroes. His mother was a goddess and his father a god, but he was conceived by a temple priest during the great rite, and so was two thirds god and one third man. The gods saw the splendor of his palace and his city walls and the pride of his subjects and, growing jealous, harden the people's hearts. They complain of their labor in building walls, and of the king taking their wives before they do. So on the grassy steppe beyond the city the gods fashion a man, Enkidu, out of earth and spittle, who runs with the gazelle and wild beasts and eats their food. One day a trapper sees the huge hairy man who has been freeing the animals. He brings a temple priestess who waits by the watering hole. She shows Enkidu her nakedness, places his hand upon her breasts and unshaved belly, draws his penis into her body, and has sex with him amongst the reeds for seven nights and six days. He is weakened, and the gazelle run from him. She leads him to the city, where he wrestles Gilgamesh until he is pinned and they become friends. Enkidu then accompanies Gilgamesh and his men on an expedition to Cedar Mountain in the east, where they cut down trees and haul them to the river. They are attacked by the invincible guardian demon, but Gilgamesh prays to Shamash, the sun god, who sends fierce storms to defeat the monster.

When Gilgamesh returns to the city, the goddess Inanna is impressed by his strength and beauty. She appears in his chamber wearing only her jewels of silver, lapis and carnelian. His penis exhibits its desire, but he refuses to have sex with her, citing what happened to her previous lovers. The lion was captured in pits, the stallion was harnessed, and each year at midsummer the women lament for Dumuzi, the shepherd king, who must descend to the underworld until he is reborn as the green vegetation that comes after the winter rains. Inanna is enraged and sends the Bull of Heaven to bring famine and earthquake. Enkidu meets it outside the city and wrestles it, and Gilgamesh kills it with his sword. Inanna curses them from from the city walls, and Enkidu tears a haunch from the bull and hurls it at her. The gods can not let this insult pass. Gilgamesh is part god and beyond their reach, but Enkidu is made of earth like other men. The king watches his friend slowly waste away, then laments and wanders out onto the grassy steppe, abandoning his fine clothes and foods. He begins to fear death and decides to seek out Utnapishtim, who survived the deluge and was granted eternal life. Gilgamesh prays to Sin, the moon god, for guidance, but when lions appear he kills them. He journeys through the sun's tunnel under the mountains, across the waste, and over the stormy ocean and the waters of death. He meets the ancient scorpion people, the goddess of beer, and the stone things. He learns of a plant that will take away the years and retrieves it from the bottom of the sea, but while he is bathing in a pool a snake comes and eats it and leaves behind his old skin. Gilgamesh is left with whatever wisdom the years have granted him. He returns to his people, sees how they live and what they do, and governs them as best he can.

I liked history and mythology, and geology and archeology, and anthropology even though it was more slanted and subjective. Those who went out and studied so called primitive cultures took their prejudices with them and saw what they wanted to see. People and their cultures are too complex to fit into neat categories. But I liked learning about people and what they thought and how and where they lived. I wanted to know what happened to them and what they did about it. Sometimes I read between the lines and added my own ideas and speculations to what others said, but was careful not to do so in any of the papers I wrote for class. The professors wanted us to quote their own ideas back to them. I also took courses that would be more useful, math and science. Why didn't everybody? They are the basis of everything, and why emasculate them by leaving out calculus? I didn't want to be an engineer, they worked only with men and just plugged in numbers. That left medicine and law. Neither appealed to me, so I decided to prepare for both. The obvious majors were biology and political science, but bio was usually done without math and poli sci as uninformed opinion. I wanted something with teeth. Pre med needed physics, chemistry, cell biology, genetics, math and statistics. Surprisingly, the most successful majors for getting into law school were also the hard sciences, followed by anthropology and economics. I decided to study all of these, plus composition, with a dual major in physics and anthropology. I could be as slanted and subjective as anyone else.

I had heard that Americans were open and free, but most people at school were more reserved and talked less than I was used to. Perhaps it was just their way, or perhaps they were all busy thinking their independent thoughts. Those who talked the most did seem to be the ones who thought the least. Boys wanted to talk to women but didn't want to say anything. As something of a joke I wrote to the advice column in the student newspaper saying American boys seemed rude. Where were the compliments? Where was the opening of doors for me? Picking me up and walking me home? The phone calls to say he missed me? These were things taken for granted by Iraqi women during courtship. They published my letter. I had used a funny name but people could tell it was me. Ms Correctness replied that it was different here. This wasn't a repressed society where the boys had never had sex. They didn't obsess as much over one particular woman, and women didn't tolerate stalkers. Everyone jockeyed for position and tried to be cooler than the next person. I was a little embarrassed to get a somewhat serious reply but wrote again and asked what about Cary Grant? She said yes, Cary Grant was cool even when obsessed, and allowed as how things here were different back in the thirties and forties, before James Dean, when there wasn't such a conflict between individuality and conformism, when kids could rebel a little and be called go getters rather than juvenile delinquents. When the boys came back after World War Two they were used to structure and the military way of doing things, which created the organization man and made the normal intergenerational conflict more extreme during the sixties.

One time during the winter of my second year I went to a dance in the cafeteria by myself. The tables were pushed back against the windows and the lights were low. It was a big place, but since the ceiling wasn't high enough for an auditorium it felt claustrophobic. I sat in a chair near one end. Someone was playing records. Women had the option of asking a boy to dance, but it was usually easier to just dance with each other. I went out with boys sometimes. I am not a pious person, and I considered having sex with them. We are taught that women have no self control and have to be watched every minute. But they were all so immature that it would have been statutory rape. What is it with this country? Protecting children is necessary and good, but when carried to this extreme it qualifies as abuse. There was a punch bowl with ginger ale and sherbet, and of course someone had added alcohol to it. A woman I didn't know came by and asked me to dance. Maybe she was fascinated by my headscarf. We stood up and bounced around to the music. Everybody was doing different stuff, and since the music wasn't too fast, after a little while I put my arms out and started doing some figure eight movements. From a stable posture I circled my right hip back and around then my left hip back and around, swaying from side to side. It sounds more complicated than it is. My partner raised her eyebrows and watched me carefully. I circled my left hip up, forward, down and back, then started circling my hips down, out, up and around to either side. While I was doing all this I added some shoulder rotations and arm ripples. She smiled at me.

After a few songs the music stopped for a break. She asked shouldn't I be wearing harem pants and a sequined halter top when I danced like that? I asked what were harem pants? She said thin baggy pants that were tight at the ankle. I said I had never seen them. This was just how everyone danced at parties and festivals. We sat down and she offered to get me a drink. I said Muslims didn't drink alcohol. She asked weren't there any bars in Iraq? I said the Americans had introduced bars, but chocolate wasn't the same as alcohol. She said no, she meant places where people hung out at night. I said those were coffee shops. We chatted at bit about our differences. When the music started again it was a slow number. She took my hand, led me out to the dance floor, and put her arms around me. I put mine around her and my head on her shoulder. Her warm body felt good as I held her softness against me. She pressed her hip into my crotch. I answered her pressure and pressed mine into hers. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the sensation and the feminine intimacy. After several moments she leaned back and tried to kiss me, but there were a lot of people around and I wouldn't let her. When the song ended she thanked me and wandered off. I danced with some other women and a couple boys, and went back to my room when the dance ended.

Listen. Assyria started out as a northern province of Akkad on the upper Tigris, although the sites of Ashur and Nineveh had been inhabited since very early times. Ashur traded tin and textiles to Turkey for copper, silver and gold. After the fall of Akkad tribes of Semitic speaking Amorites from the western steppe started moving into its remains and took over some of the cities. The cities fought each other and the surrounding peoples, and for a time the city of Ur controlled the south. One Amorite built the Early Assyria Empire on the upper Tigris and Euphrates rivers with his armies and installed two of his sons as rulers of different cites. But soon after his death it crumbled when the Babylonians invaded. They didn't stay long. Later the Indo European speaking Mitanni from Turkey invaded. Eventually an Assyrian king revolted and in 1365 BC founded the Middle Assyrian Empire. It grew to include parts of Babylon, Turkey, Iran and Syria. After the Bronze Age Collapse and a period of decline another king established the New Assyrian Empire in 934 BC. It expanded beyond the former boundaries to the Mediterranean. Aramaic was made an official language. The empire was reorganized into smaller, easier to manage provinces, and whole populations were shuffled around. Deportees from northern Israel became The Ten Lost Tribes. The Assyrians destroyed Babylon and its temples and ruled Egypt for a short time. Then they decided they needed the Babylonians as allies and so rebuilt the city. The gods had decreed it should lie in ruins for seventy years but got around this by turning the Book of Destiny upside down. (Seventy is a stroke in the sixties column and a wedge in the ones column. Upside down it is read as one digit, a wedge and a stroke, which is eleven.) Yet after a civil war between factions in Assyria, the Babylonians joined with the Medes from Iran to destroy Nineveh and take over the empire. Assyria existed in some form for 1400 years, four times as long as America.

Western printed letters are lines and curves, the capitals from Roman inscriptions and the minuscules from Charlemagne's scribes. Cuneiform is writing done on clay tablets with wedges and stokes. It is carved into stone for inscriptions. It was invented by the Sumerians and used by the Akkadians to represent their language. Other Semitic speaking people picked it up and adapted it, as did the Indo European speaking Hittites. The Assyrians developed it into an art form. The clay tablets are fragile and care must be taken when excavating them. They can be destroyed by an armored vehicle driving through an army base built on an ancient city mound, as the American's sometimes were. When cites were burned the clay was inadvertently baked and the tablets became nearly indestructible. Records on paper, such as those of the Greeks and Romans, must be recopied through the centuries or they are lost. Gilgamesh and other literature from Sumer and Akkad was recopied by scribes of early Babylon and Assyria, but from then on we have original sources, the actual letters and documents written by kings and administrators, not later copies of them. Orientalists tried for decades to decipher cuneiform, but no progress was made until a German high school teacher and amateur cryptologist made a start. He recognized an inscription as the name of a king and his father, and went through king lists until he found ones of the right length that matched up. It was several more years before anyone paid attention to his work.

The Asian lion ranged from Palestine to India up until the middle ages. They were symbols of strength and courage since the lion and bull were the most powerful creatures or things known, as the steam engine was later. Lions were thought to be watchful and sleep with their eyes open. Inanna was shown standing on a lion or a pair of lions, and carved or mosaic lions often stood at the entrance to her temple. They are still seen at the entrance to libraries. A lamassu is an Assyrian protective deity depicted as a winged lion or bull, usually with a human head. Enormous reliefs of them stood at the entrance to cities, and ones inscribed on clay were buried beneath the thresholds of houses. Both of them are companions to God in the Christian Bible, and they are symbols for St Mark and St Luke. Egypt borrowed the idea for the guardian of the pyramids, the Sphinx. A guardian spirit is now represented as a winged human. The Greeks thought of the one who watched the Minoan Labyrinth as a demon, so the Minotaur became a bull with a human body. Reliefs from Nineveh now in the British Museum show the king hunting lions from a chariot. There were no lions on the plain at the time, so they had to be imported from the mountains. Only kings were allowed to hunt lions. Roman troops stationed in foreign lands got bored, so lions were used for entertainment. They would scoop up random members of the local population and watch lions kill and dismember them in the hundreds of amphitheaters they built for the purpose throughout their empire. Of course lions did not like to eat humans, so they had to be starved first. Herakles is most often depicted wearing a lion skin and carrying a club, although lions became extinct in Greece shortly after the classical period.

One time, soon after the start of my third year, I came back from the library and found a sock on the doorknob. It was what the women here did. I knew it meant my roommate had a boy in the room, but I unlocked the door and went in anyway. I wasn't going to be kept out of my own room. I heard the bed squeaking and the room reeked of sex. In the glare of her desk light I saw them naked on her bed, she with her knees spread on either side of him and her arms locked around his neck, him on top with his buttocks leisurely clenching and his penis sliding into her. I had never seen an actual penis before but knew what they looked like. They didn't stop. She glared at me briefly and he leered, but neither said anything. I got my things and headed to the bathroom to wash up and change. They were still going when I got back, so I got into bed and faced the wall. At least their squeaks and gasps weren't very loud. Still, I couldn't sleep, so I wet my middle two fingers and put them between my legs. Their sounds were disturbing, and my excitement mounted as I rhythmically touched myself. Not all sources forbid masturbation, and most of those that do refer to boys. A male is supposed to save himself so he can have children, but with a woman it doesn't matter, although the Christians have yet to figure this out. A Muslim man isn't much concerned with a woman's pleasure one way or the other. He thinks she just wants his seed. I gave no indication of what I was doing except for a slight spasm as I found release.

Some time later I woke when I felt him lift the sheet away from me. I knew it had to be him. I kept my eyes closed and waited to see what would happen. He hesitated. Then I felt his touch on my arm. His hand slid gently up my sleeve to my shoulder. I felt his weight shift onto the bed and his fingertips slide down my chest, over my breast, and rest lightly on my nipple. His hand cupped my breast through my nightshirt. When I felt him squeeze the nipple and heard his breath catch, I turned in one motion and nicked him. It was just a warning to let him know I was serious. He was just a kid and didn't know what he was doing. I had grown up in a war zone. My mother had taught me how defend myself. Men here got excited over knives and treated them like toys. They were tools. I had used them in the kitchen all my life. This was a Spyderco Dragonfly, small enough to fit anywhere, easy to open, and big enough to hold properly. The Americans made good knives. He didn't even bleed very much but seemed to think he was going to die. After a lot of noise and excitement he managed to struggle into his clothes and flee. I warned my roommate not to bring any more rapists into the room. She got hysterical, and some of the other women led her away. They couldn't seem to decide whether I was stupid, insane, or evil.

A few days later I got a new roommate. She had heard I needed one and offered to move in. I had appreciated her thoughtfulness and accepted. She was from Korea and was studying theater and music and education and physics. And also gymnastics and psychology. Her name was Lee Sang Mi, but she said to call her Lisa. She had short black hair that came down to her dark brown eyes. I liked the emerald studs in her ears. She was built like a gymnast, short and thin and powerful, and moved like a warrior, with casual attention to everything around her. She said people here, especially young people, didn't appreciate how dangerous life was. If they started to, they went into therapy until the feeling went away. I helped her move her books and clothes from her old room. She had an Indian tabla, which is a small cylindrical wooden drum and a larger bowl shaped metal one with a deeper tone. You play it while sitting on the floor. She said she was studying it in the world music program here. I was impressed and asked how she found time for everything? She said discipline and planning, plus she had developed a good visual and kinetic memory and could see how things fit together. She said they were skills most people could learn if they worked at it. I asked if she would teach them to me? She smiled a little and said she would be happy to.

The following week Lisa invited me to watch gymnastics practice. She said the coach allowed female guests if they were quiet. I sat on the bleachers as quietly as I could and watched the women do their stretches and warm ups. Their practice uniforms were actually dark blue bathing suits with a waving white stripe down either side that was bordered in aqua. They were high cut and thin and didn't hide anything. They were tight enough to keep their breasts from bouncing around too much but not enough to restrict their movements. After a few minutes the entire team stood on their hands and walked, upside down, from one end of the mat to the other. And back. I was astonished and sat there with my mouth open. Afterward Lisa glanced at me and smiled. I closed my mouth and nodded approval. There were two balance beams set up above the mats. I watched them work on their backflips and turns and leaps while standing on a four inch wide piece of wood and didn't understand any of it. But I was impressed. One arched her leg back so that her foot was behind her head. I saw some run down the beam, leap into the air, flip over, and land with a leg on either side of the beam. No boy could do that.

Listen. The Amorites founded the city of Babylon on the middle Euphrates after the fall of Akkad. Hammurabi of Babylon drove the Elamites back to Iran and built an empire on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. His conquest of Ashur on the upper Tigris ended the Early Assyrian Empire. His famous law code was a harsher version of several earlier codes. After his death Assyria and other states broke away, and the Elamites returned in the south. His successors tried to hang on to the remaining kingdom but just made things worse. They let merchants foreclose on cropland and farm it without letting fields lie fallow, so it became infertile. In 1620 BC a volcanic eruption in the Aegean Sea and the resulting tidal wave destroyed the Minoan civilization on Crete and other coastal areas. The Mycenaean Greeks expanded into the vacuum. Shortly after the Minoan Eruption, the displaced Indo European speaking Hittites raided down the Euphrates from Turkey, sacked Babylon, and left. The Kassites from Iran moved into the vacuum. They ruled Babylon for a long time but were for a while dominated by the Middle Assyrian Empire.

After ten years of fighting in Turkey the Mycenaean Greeks succeeded in burning Troy, but while they were away the Dorian Greeks, said to be descendants of the culture hero Herakles, moved into the vacuum. The Mycenaeans could not retake Greece, so they burned its cities. Since they had been at war for so long most of them, along with many of those they displaced, became the Sea Peoples and continued raiding. The whole thing snowballed, and they ended up burning most of the cites of Turkey, Syria and Palestine, which destroyed international trade and, since the urban populations depended on imported grain, plunged the ancient Middle East into a dark age. Some people migrated west to Italy and Spain. Egypt was able to defend itself, although in the confusion the Israelis escaped and later moved into the vacuum in Palestine. Assyria was far enough inland to survive the Bronze Age Collapse. Babylon didn't. Elamites from Iran deposed the Kassites. Native rulers fought with the Elamites, Assyrians, Arameans and Chaldeans until finally the New Assyrian Empire took control. Babylon revolted several times. Later a Chaldean from southern Mesopotamia conquered Babylon, joined with the Medes from Iran, and in 612 BC destroyed Nineveh. The eastern part of the empire went to the Medes and the north to others, but the Babylonian portion included Assyria and was the start of the New Babylonian Empire. The Chaldean's son was Nebuchadnezzar, who built the famous Hanging Gardens and conquered Syria, parts of Turkey and Arabia, and Israel.

Most people think the Arabs invented the zero. Most scholars think they are wrong, that it's from India. What Europeans call Arabic numbers, Arabs call Hindu numbers. But it was actually the Babylonians who invented the zero. They had digits for one through fifty nine and left a blank space to indicate zero. This works okay for for telling 402 from 42, but for telling 420 from 42 they had to rely on context, that is, which number made more sense. This was not quite as hard as it sounds, since by 42 they meant 242, and by 420 they meant 14,520 or sixty times as much. They invented a positional number system like we use today, but they inherited the digits from the Sumerians. The digits were not all separate symbols, but were constructed out of just two different symbols, a wedge for ten and a stoke for one. So two was something like , and twenty two was . The wedges and strokes were stacked in groups of three, which works better on clay tablets than in print. The best I can do is use to show forty and to show seven. The digit for fifty nine was , and   is forty times sixty plus two, or 2402. You'll just have to trust me that the space in the middle is the normal space between digits and not a space that means zero. It works better on clay tablets, but it doesn't work well. For adding numbers the Babylonians used an abacus. They didn't have an easy way to do multiplication, but they did have extensive tables of squares on their clay tablets, so they used the formula ab=((a+b)²-a²-b²)/2. They did long division using tables of reciprocals, and they had algebra but not as much geometry as the Greeks. I will spare you the details, except to say that the word algebra comes from the Arabic al-jabr, which means restoring, or doing the same on one side as on the other, and that algorithm is from the name al-Khwarizmi.

The Chaldeans invented science. They saw correspondences between their gods and the heavenly bodies and assumed that what happened in the heavens was reflected on earth. They made careful observations and kept records of the movements of the moon, the sun, and the planets on their clay tablets, as did their predecessors, and they liked to study numbers. They discovered they could add seven extra lunar months in every nineteen years instead instead of adding random extra months as needed. They discovered that an eclipse would recur every 18 years and 11.32 days (or 10.32 days, depending on how the leap years fell). They also discovered that the motion of the sun was not uniform, that it moved faster through the stars during part of the year. They didn't know that it was because the earth's orbit is slightly elliptical. They had clear skies, dark nights, high temples, and good eyesight, but their only equipment was a few sticks, a bowl, and a piece of string. We don't know much about Chaldean astronomy, and most of what we do know comes from the Greeks. It was they who started calling the late Babylonians Chaldeans, although it was only their kings who came from there.

I decided I wanted a hanging garden for my window. Lisa thought it was a good idea, so the next weekend we drove out to the garden center at the building supply store to look at plants. The selection was a bit sparse this time of year, but we picked out a Boston fern, an ivy geranium, a spider plant, a begonia, and a wandering Jew. I got some hardware to hang them with and installed it above our dorm window using Lisa's tools. We hung them at different heights so they would all fit. Everyone thought they looked nice. Watering them was a problem, the water would drip onto the floor. One of the women in the dorm suggested ice cubes. So every few days I would bring some back from the cafeteria after dinner in a cup and put them in the pots. It worked fine. A while later, as we were walking back from another of Lisa's gymnastics practices, I told her how good I thought she and the other women looked. She was quiet for a minute. Then she said she thought I looked good too, and she could be attracted to me if she let herself. What did I think about that? I hesitated, then said I didn't know and would have to think about it a little. She said not to take too long.

I didn't. Male and female brains are pretty much the same. Everyone is born with a desire to penetrate and a desire to be penetrated. Which is expressed depends mostly on testosterone levels and available body parts, but circumstances can override both of these. Late the next evening I sat on my bed and told her that in Iraq women weren't supposed to like women, but that people considered sex with another woman to be sort of okay since it wasn't with a man. At least most women seemed to. Men didn't, but found the idea too bizarre to take seriously if they didn't have too. I said I wasn't interested in a romantic relationship, but if she wanted, I would like to be more than her friend. She looked uncertain, then asked what I meant. I said I would have sex with her if she didn't get all starry eyed and absent minded. She said ah, and that she thought she could control herself. She came over and sat on the bed next to me. I put put my arm around her and kissed her. She kissed me back. Thoroughly. After a while she reached down and undid my jeans. I pulled up my shirt and undid my bra. She cupped one of my breasts with her hand and ran her thumb gently over the nipple. I expressed my appreciation. She leaned down and stroked the nipple with her tongue. Bliss. She sucked it into her mouth. I gasped and squirmed, but she held onto me. She moved back up and slid her hand into my pants. I closed my eyes and felt her slippery fingers touching me. A couple minutes later she pulled off my jeans and panties. While I took off my shirt and bra, she took off her own jeans. She stood and looked at me as I lay there naked looking back up at her expectantly. My mother had taught me about sex and how to please a man. With a woman, either the body parts were the same or the techniques could be adapted. I spread my legs a little. She pushed them apart farther, opened my folds, and licked up the length. She sucked my clitoris into her mouth and played with it with her tongue. I felt her hands holding my buttocks as my excitement grew and I pumped against her. I moaned silently. She slipped a finger into me and pressed gently upward in just the right spot. She slowed down and held me on the edge. I moaned in ecstasy and frustration. She held me there for an infinite moment, then let me come. I spasmed and grunted. She kept going and did me again, and then again. She crawled up beside me and held me as I panted. Then she slipped off her shirt, bra and panties. When I was ready I slid down and did her. She seemed to like my amateur efforts. It was a little crowded with both of us sleeping in the same bed.

Lisa's excellent body inspired me to go to the pool more often. She had decided to be a high school math teacher, hence the education courses, but her dual major was in math and theater. When I asked her about it, she said she had had some good teachers and some not so good teachers, and had learned how much difference they could make in people's lives. She wanted to be one of the good ones. She thought it was more important to understand her subject and be able to present it than to know more education theory, at least for older students. Iraqi firms didn't hire female engineers, doctors or lawyers. Only foreign firms in Iraq would hire women. I loved my country and my people and mourned for what had happened to them. I wanted to return and make a difference, but that did not seem possible given the present situation. Maybe later. What Lisa said made sense to me. I hadn't thought of it exactly that way before. Law was too arcane, adversarial and arbitrary, and I was afraid of the medical industry. High schools didn't teach anthropology. I could teach history, but no American high school would hire a Muslim history teacher, or probably one from any foreign country. I liked math, but it was too abstract. I wanted something with a more direct connection to the world. Biology would be good, but there was a much greater need for high school physics and chemistry teachers. So that's what I chose. I would start taking education courses next semester. I wasn't sure how I would manage it. Maybe not take that other economics course I wanted. I needed the differential equations course. Lisa had tried to teach me discipline and planning and how to develop a better memory. It helped some, but not as much as I had hoped.

Listen. Cyrus of Persia, along with the new Zoroastrian religion, united the Indo European speaking Medes and Persians of Iran and in 539 BC conquered Babylon. He freed the southern Israelis and let them return to their homeland, and he invented freedom of religion. Most of the Israelis preferred to stay in Babylon, becoming an early Jewish exile community. Yes, the Elamites, Kassites, Medes and Persians all came from Iran. It's a big place with lots of mountains, and it was invaded just as often as everywhere else. The Persian Empire included Turkey, Syria, Palestine and Egypt until it was conquered by Alexander and the Greeks. After the death of Alexander, his generals divided up his empire among themselves. The Greeks imported their own culture and built their own cities in Mesopotamia, although they and the local people interacted and influenced each other. The population also included Persians, Aramaeans and Arabs. The Arabs were the people who spoke Arabic, a Semitic language like Akkadian, Aramaic and Hebrew. The original Arabs were nomadic goat and sheep herding Bedouins. People said the they came from the desert, but this is not true. Except for a few oases, no one lived in the desert. They lived on or near the grassy steppe of its periphery, on the borders of Babylon, Syria and Palestine and along the southern coast of Arabia. The Greeks had maintained the temples and canals, the Persians who came after them didn't. They used the taxes for foreign wars against the Romans rather than for infrastructure. The temples crumbled and the canals silted up. The temples were corporate entities with large holdings in agriculture and commerce, and as their buildings collapsed, so did they. Agriculture had always depended on the large and complex system of irrigation canals and reservoirs. Trade routes that had run through the region moved to the new royal road built along the mountains to the north. Babylon had been a center of civilization since its founding, even when it was conquered. Now it was bypassed. Christianity spread throughout the region. The Roman Empire in the west was overrun. The Roman Empire in the east survived, although the Europeans insist on calling it Byzantium. Its people spoke Greek rather than Latin. Arabs were able to establish cities in the desert on the Roman trade route to India and China that used the southern ocean, but when trade declined the cities returned to sand and nomadism increased.

The Arabian Nights are tales of adventure and eroticism from before Islam with a surface layer of Muslim piety added. Over the course of many nights, as we lay in bed together, I told Lisa the story of Scheherazade and the King. When the king's brother was about to start on a journey to visit him, he discovered his wife asleep in bed with a large black cook. He drew his blade and killed them both. When he arrived, the King asked why he could neither eat nor sleep, but he would not say. Later he saw the king's concubines by the fountain in the courtyard fucking their white slaves, and the king's wife with a large black man. Later, in the king's chambers, to save her own life and others, Scheherazade had her sister summoned, and after the king had entered his new bride and satisfied himself, had her ask for a story. Lisa liked Ali Baba's servant girl, Morgiana, who killed the thieves in their jars with boiling oil and the disguised leader at the end of her dance with a knife. I said there was a statue of her and the jars in a traffic circle in central Baghdad. It used to be a fountain with water pouring out of and into the jars, but it no longer ran. Lisa asked what color Aladdin's lamp was, and I said it was brass covered with verdigris. She said no one remembers the magic ring and wanted to know what color that was too. I said it was green jade. She wanted to know more about the giant rocs that Sinbad encountered on his second and fifth voyages, so I told her rocs were said to be white, but that this is not true. They are most often black, being related to crows and ravens, however there is sometimes some white upon them. In spite of their fierce nature they are not devil birds, like the nightjar or the shrike, but are one of God's creatures. Some time later she showed me a new emerald ring she had bought. The stone wasn't large, but it was a nice silver ring with a botanical art nouveau design. I noticed she wore it more often than her studs or pendant. She always had an emerald of some sort, except during gymnastic meets.

After I graduated I found a position at a private school downtown in a nearby city. Lisa found one in the suburbs. We both knew our relationship wouldn't last, she was primarily lesbian and I was primarily hetero, but since rents were so high we decided to share an apartment temporarily. We found a small one bedroom we could afford in a marginal neighborhood on the edge of the city. We got a queensize bed so we would finally have enough room, and a twin bed as a sofa in the living room in case one of us had a friend over. I went back to practicing the oud more regularly. I hadn't had time in college and mostly just swapped scales and rhythms with Lisa, although I did take a few lessons from a member of the Middle Eastern music group. I tried attending different area mosques, one with many black people, and spoke to the believers there. They were all friendly and welcomed me to their services, even though I was Shia, but there was no place in their community for a single woman.

Several months after I had settled into my new job, on a warm day in late winter, I was about to pass a drummer on the sidewalk without taking much notice when I heard him shift rhythms and start singing in what was supposed to Arabic. The only reason I could understand the words was because I recognized the melody and already knew them. I stopped to listen. He smiled at me and nodded. When he finished, I put a dollar in his open drum case and said that was terrible. He said yes, he'd picked up the song from some street musicians in Nairobi. He had managed to memorize a few verses but didn't speak Arabic and so didn't know what they meant. I said it was a love song, or had been before he'd gotten hold of it. He apologized and asked for a chance to redeem himself. Did I have any requests? I asked if he knew any Brahms, besides the lullaby? He said fate must have brought me here. He had learned a piece not too long ago. To my astonishment, he started playing a wonderful version of Brahms' sonata for cello and piano in E minor on just an African drum accompanied by a little humming. When he finished the first movement, I complimented him and added a couple more dollars. He thanked me and said his name was Kamau, and he was happy to meet me. I said I was Parveen. He said ah, Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. I said I thought he couldn't speak Arabic. He said he'd picked up a few words here and there. Many star names in English came from Arabic. Aldebaran the follower, Rigel the foot, Betelgeuse the hand of Orion, Vega the stooping eagle, Altair the flying eagle, Fomalhaut the mouth of the whale. I said Betelgeuse wasn't very close to the original Arabic, Pleiades was from Greek, and Parveen was technically from Persian, but I could see what he meant. Actually I hadn't a clue, but he was cute and seemed to mean well. He said if I wanted to hear some real chamber music, he knew some people and I should give him a call, and then handed me his card. It said he performed at weddings, funerals and special occasions, and gave drum lessons. I said I might do that and continued on my way.

I am an evil person. I did not always do my dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and evening prayers. I still said God is great, stood, recited, bowed, touched my forehead, nose, palms, knees and toes to the ground, sat, and said peace and mercy be upon you, and did all the repetitions required, but I skipped prayers when they were inconvenient. I wasn't the only Muslim to ever skip prayer, but it's a sensitive subject and never talked about by believers. I gave to charity and fasted but did not intend to make a pilgrimage and could no longer sincerely profess my faith. I didn't see any point to arguing over the number of gods or details of practice. I thought about letting my pubic hair grow. If shapes were clearly worse than a natural tangle, then was shaving really better? But I decided to keep it as it was. I started reading Rumi and Hafez more carefully.

I did call Kamau. So on a tuesday night a month later I stood alone at the door of a strange apartment. It was a decent neighborhood and a nice building, and I could defend myself. I didn't think I was being too stupid. A woman with short red hair and many freckles answered the door, said I must be Parveen, she was Linda, and invited me in. I saw Kamau, several other people, and a piano. It looked alright. I was introduced and didn't remember any other names. Everyone said it was nice to meet me. Linda offered me a spot on the sofa or a chair from the kitchen, but I sat on the carpet with Kamau. Four of them sat in chairs with music stands in front. The two Asian women picked up violins and the man picked up a viola. The tall blond woman picked up her cello. Linda and the other black man sat on the sofa, and two other men sat on the floor with us. The first piece was Bartok's second string quartet. They checked their tuning and started. There is no real way to describe music. Every attempt sounds stupid and gives no idea what the music sounds like. The cello holds a note. The second violin and viola play repeated close dissonant notes. The first violin has a motif that is three fast notes rising a sixth or an octave or an eleventh that are not a triplet followed by a falling note of some sort. The cello picks up the motif, then the others. They slow down and speed up and do all sorts of stuff. The second movement is fast with a slow part in the middle. The last movement is slow with a lot of held notes and some that bounce around, sort of minimalist. It ends with a low isolated plucked cord that is repeated once. If it were Beethoven he might have repeated it a few more times, but this is Bartok so it just sits there.

During the break they served chocolate bundt cake and tea. Some of us stood in the kitchen area and others sat in the living area. I ate at the counter and asked Linda whose apartment it was. She said she and Paul lived here with Judy, Mark and Jose. Paul had sat with Linda, and Judy played second violin. I said I shared a place with my roommate from college. Linda said Grace, the first violin player, was also a newcomer here. She was from Maui and had just joined the group last week. I said I was amazed at how good they were. Grace admitted that three of them were professionals with the symphony. They came here for a chance to play chamber music. I said that explained it. She was of Japanese descent and had gone to the music conservatory here. I asked Kamau if he played with the group? He said there weren't a lot of western classical chamber pieces for djembe, but he tried to take other parts or create his own. He had done the piano part of the Brahms cello sonata, which sounded better when there was also a cello. He would play the timpani part in the next piece. It was the Martinu Concerto da Camera for solo violin, piano, timpani, percussion and strings. He and Linda moved two more chairs into the living area. She played triangle, Paul played piano, and the quartet took the string parts. It starts with an ominous theme in the low strings with a moderate walking tempo and a skip in the middle. It builds. The violin starts a dialogue with the piano using parts of the theme and some runs. The strings come back and join in. It builds again. The violin spirals downward and back up then bounces around while the other instruments do things with the theme. Blocks of sound tumble. The violin dances and stutters. The theme rises in the violin, pauses, and thumps to a conclusion in the low strings. A slow sad version of the theme paces through the first part of the second movement but gets lost in the middle. The theme comes back in the last movement but this time it's just the skip. It gets confused the turns into a parody of itself. The violin and the strings talk to each other. The triangle comes in halfway through. The violin starts crying to the piano. Everybody rushes around. It stops. I thought it was even more impressive than the Bartok. Kamau got at least four or five different tones from his drum. I told him how much I liked his playing. It sounded as if Martinu had written the part for djembe. He thanked me and asked if I would like to go out to dinner sometime? I said yes.

I told Lisa I was going out with Kamau again. She asked if I was going to fuck him? I said not on a second date. She said a third? I said probably. She asked if I was going to leave her? I said I hoped not, but it was a possibility. I didn't know how he felt about me having someone on the side. I met Kamau at a little Caribbean restaurant he knew. He had curry goat with rice and peas, and I had a chicken Jamaican patty with coco bread. We both had ginger beer and gizzada, a pastry with coconut, nutmeg and vanilla. I told him about Lisa. He looked serious. I said I hoped it was alright. He told me about Eliska, Owl and Grace. He'd met Eliska, the cellist, at a drum circle and they started a relationship. She introduced him to the music group. She also recruited Jeremiah, the viola player, and renewed her relationship with him. She'd known him at school, and he and Kamua now shared an apartment. Kamau and Eliska had previously been in a group relationship that included Owl and two other men. The group had split, but he was still in an individual relationship with her. Now Eliska was trying to recruit Grace. I said oh, then I guess he didn't mind about Lisa. He said no. I said that was good, I didn't want to give her up even though I was mostly hetero. He asked how I felt about his relationships? I said I was surprised and wasn't sure yet. It wouldn't be accepted in Islam, but maybe it should be, since men could have multiple wives. Polyandry used to be practiced by Muslims in India and Saudi Arabia, often by brothers. Jeremiah seemed like his brother. As far as I knew marriage had been either one man or one woman. How large did he think the group would get? He said the original limit had been five, but Eliska hadn't liked that. Some communes in this country had had forty eight people, but he didn't want many more than five, with one or maybe two outside relationships if the person thought she could handle them. Actually, Eliska thought she could handle more than that. He had to explain to me about communes during the sixties and seventies. He said among his people, before they had moved into houses, a man had added a hut to the compound for each wife.

I went to another chamber music session and this time took my oud. They were going through Bach's fourth Brandenburg Concerto, for solo violin, two flutes and strings, with Mark and Karen on flutes and Stephen playing the continuo part on guitar. It turned out that Linda and the others who lived here had a group relationship, like the one Kamau was part of, and they called it polyamory, or poly. Karen and Stephen were part of another poly group that had some overlap with theirs. The piece starts with a big chord out of which the second flute plays a fast rising and falling passage while the first flute holds a high note above it. The flutes step together, then the first flute plays the identical rising and falling passage while the second flute holds a low note beneath it. The violin starts a long passage and the other strings come in. Everyone keeps going. Then the violin starts a longer passage, this time unaccompanied except by a few bass notes and the flutes rising and falling at three different places. The flutes and the other strings come back. The flutes have a solo, then the violin has a long skittering passage. I don't know how Grace did it. I can't even listen that fast. More flutes and strings until at last they slow down to the final chord. The second movement is slow and stately steps. In the last movement the strings alternate with solo passages, and there is some skittering that's even faster than before. When they finished I couldn't help myself. I applauded. During the break Stephen and I tried playing guitar and oud together. It was interesting. The closest thing we had to common ground was the Beatles imitation Indian music. Afterward they worked on the Bartok string quartet some more.

For my third date with Kamau I borrowed Lisa's car and took him to a Lebanese deli I knew about. I had a falafel sandwich and he had ful. I invited him back to the apartment afterward. He met Lisa and we talked a bit, then she said she was tired. I told him we should use the bathroom now, because you had to go through the bedroom to get to it. So I managed to get Kamau alone on a single bed in the living room without, I hoped, being too obvious about it. I said I didn't think his other relationships would be a problem. Was he trying to recruit me into his group, or did he have other plans? He said whatever worked out, but so far he was only interested in me. I was pretty sure he didn't mean that like it sounded, but I let it go and leaned forward. He closed his eyes and kissed me as we sat there next to each other. I sucked his lower lip between my teeth and nibbled it. His tongue came out and brushed my exposed upper lip. I met it with own. The tips swirled together in a rich dance of sensation. One arm was around my shoulders and the other hand rested gently on my thigh. I put my own arm around his lower back and a hand on his pants and felt the bulge beneath, much harder than Lisa's soft bulges. After a while I stopped and took off my headscarf. He stood up and took off his pants. So I took mine off while sitting down. He had on dark blue bikini briefs which barely contained him and with a large wet spot off to one side. I stretched out on the bed and he joined me. We kissed, and his hand explored my back and my buttocks. I caressed his shoulder, ribs and hip. His deep brown skin fascinated and excited me. I was an Arab and bit dark for a white person, but not like this.

After another while I broke off and sat up to finish undressing. He stood up to take off his shirt and underwear. I looked at his penis and when he lay back down, examined it carefully with my fingers. Some parts were hard and some parts were softer and yielding. When I lay back he slipped a finger into my slit and sucked on my breast and nipple. He caressed my clitoris but didn't understand it nearly as well as Lisa. He slipped a finger in to examine me from the other side. I was very wet. He sat up and reached for his pants, then unrolled a condom over himself. I spread my legs farther. He positioned himself and guided himself into me. I didn't tell him it was my first time. He didn't push in all the way at first. He began with very slow shallow thrusts. Then he started penetrating slightly farther each time, meeting no obstruction. Finally I felt his curly pubic hair grinding against my smoothness. I was used to being filled, with fingers, dildos and vibrators (Lisa liked variety), but this was different, this was what I had been designed for, even though the main sensation was elsewhere. We paused each time, pushing against each other. Then he slid part way out, paused again, and slowly pushed back in. I felt the muscles of his buttocks knot, just as mine were doing, as I held them lightly with my fingers. At some point I realized we must have been gradually increasing our speed, because we weren't going as slowly as before. I felt sensation starting to build, but not enough to get anywhere. Not yet. It would have been frustrating, if it hadn't been so intense and exciting. I noted another increase in speed. Now the energy was swirling through my entire body, concentrated at our point of contact, but still not focused. Another increase. I could feel the pressure building, circling. No, not yet. There was no release. Another. The pressure slowed, expanded. Wait. Yes. Here. Now. Over the edge and into the sweet, sweet darkness and light, the everything and the nothing, where I have always been. If Kamau had been looking for something, he found it, because he held me there, in that impossible place. Finally, when he judged I'd had enough, or he had, he let himself go, and fell like the proverbial ton of bricks, so different from what I was used to, and we lay there exhausted. Being Kamau's second wife seemed like it would be okay. I didn't count Owl because he had sort of broken up with her.

Listen. After the wars between the Persians and Romans resumed, the southern trade routes again became important and the Arabs prospered. They learned about war and about religion. After Islam arose they were able to defeat both belligerents, except for fortified Constantinople. The Muslims set out to conquer the entire civilized world, and did, except for most of China. Europe didn't count since, after the fall of Rome, it had collapsed back into barbarism where it remained for a thousand years, until the Florentines and Venetians pulled them out of it using texts preserved by the Irish and the Arabs. The Muslims founded Baghdad on the Tigris in 762 AD as their capital. Their control eventually extended from Indonesia and India to Portugal and Morocco, and from Hungary and southern Russia to the coasts of Tanzania and northern Mozambique. Orthodox Islam was concerned with correct belief and correct behavior but not with personal religious experience. This vacuum was filled by Sufism, which preached union with God in this life. Like the early Christian monks, the early Sufis were poor wondering preachers. Unlike the Albigensians, who were exterminated, the Domincicans, who became rich, and the Francicans, who were co-opted, the Sufis adapted but always remained suspect and egalitarian. In spite of, or perhaps because of, their belief in spiritual union, they kept splintering off into different branches.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry, I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.
If anyon_

If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,
and say, Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,
and dance and say, Like this?

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God�s fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.
Keep your face there close. Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.
of your robe. Like this?

One of the things Sufis believed in was music. And also poetry. Their many references to alcohol are allegorical since Islam forbids drinking. They do seem to have preserved a knowledge of its effects. They have to be talking about more than reaching ecstatic states and seeing visions, don't they? Rumi wrote about looking for something and not finding it or knowing what it was. I often have dreams like that. Like his obsession with love and sex, I don't know how much of it he meant literally.

Something In your soul trusts Me Otherwise it would not let you near These words. God has spilled a Great One Into each of us, This warrior is always fearless But also always Kind. The only business I am concerned With these Days, Since I heard the Moon�s drunk Singing, Is Stealing Back our flute from Krishna.

I don't speak Persian and didn't understand most of Hafez in any of the translations I have seen. Some of them are popular in this country, but they seem more New Age than Muslim. He doesn't sound serious, but he has been widely read and highly respected in his native land for centuries. Maybe not enough of my soul trusts him. Maybe I am just stupid. Maybe the power is in the words themselves, like William Blake. I can't imagine a translation of The Tiger making sense. I do like some of his poetry.

The next month I went to a concert with Kamau given by him and his friends. It was the same people but a different group. They called themselves Polymorphous and played Celtic music. It was on a tuesday so we left after people got out of work and drove two hours to an insane building out in the woods. There was a small stage with seating on either side and above. The place was a used book store called Tao Book Muffin run by a woman named Anya. I talked to her while the others were setting up. She was an artist, and some of her pictures of people and birds and fish were hung in the cafe area. They were full of movement and stillness at the same time. The opening act was two flute duets by Telemann and a string quartet by Beethoven. During intermission I bought a black and white cookie from a volunteer and talked to Stephen. He had a ginger ale. Jose was the group's regular guitar player. Stephen had gotten to play when they brought in Karen as the second flute. He said the bookstore was owned by Leon, another person in his group, who had inherited it when the original owner died. I told him about being at school and how different things were here. He was from Greece and had also experienced culture shock. I told him about trying to adapt my religious practices and being unsure if I was doing the right thing. The rules were very strict. He said all organized religions were intolerant. It was part of their function. One needed to follow a specific path or he would wind up following the path of least resistance, which always led to hell. The problem was mistaking a specific path for the only true path and condemning all the rest. I said the Sufis were suspect because some of them didn't follow the rules exactly, but respected for their devotion and knowledge. He said he liked Rumi. His teachings about caring and respect for others fit in with the path he was trying follow. I asked what that was?

He said some of it was based on Fromm's idea of love, but most of it came from Buddhism and Taoism. He believed we are here to learn and to help others. We get as much time and as many chances as we need, but change needs to be sincere. Waiting until just before we die doesn't work. I asked if he wanted to be a bodhisattva and save everyone? He said to save the world we don't need to reach everyone. Only a small percent need to be enlightened, and then there will be a cascade effect. That is still a huge number and we are nowhere close. However, we have no organized opposition, there is only greed and mindlessness. But everybody wants to be zombie. It hides the pain. And they want everybody else to be one too, because they are afraid of hope. Not sentimental hope that is actually despair, but real hope that people work toward without attachment. He said the Greek gods were made of marble. Catholic and Orthodox icons had been suppressed, fought over, and paraded like idols in ancient Babylon. But idols don't have to be stone or wood, idols can be cloth or paper. Nationalists worship a flag as more than a rallying point or a symbol. Some Jews and Muslims worship words themselves instead of what they say. Rich people worship themselves. I said not money? He said he didn't think so. Giving up your integrity and being blind is not religion. Religion is love. It is hearing the word and seeing the light. It is following precepts and accepting responsibility for your thoughts, words and deeds. It is knowing that actions have consequences. I looked up into his eyes. They were a rich brown patterned with black. He'd gotten a little carried away but now calmly looked back.

I asked how did he know all this? He said he didn't. It was a guess based on reading, speculation and personal observation. He hoped I wasn't offended. I said no, I didn't know how much I agreed with him but could see what he meant. It was something to think about. The lights went down, and we moved back to the railing overlooking the stage area for the main act. Linda was the singer and played hand drum. Judy was on fiddle, Mark on flute, Jose on guitar, Eliska on Cello, and Kamau on djembe. They were good and the crowd liked them. Grace sat in for a couple numbers on second fiddle. Later that night both she and I decided to join Kamau's poly group and were accepted by Eliska, Jeremiah and him. It was a commitment, but didn't really change anything since I didn't move in with anybody. There seemed to be some sort of ritual involved.

A few days later Kamau stayed over at my apartment again. We were curled up in the extra bed after having sex. I felt his arm around me and the damp remnants of his erection pressed against my lower back. He asked how I felt about witchcraft. I said I didn't believe in it. How did I feel about ESP? I rolled over to face him and said I didn't believe in that either. What if some people could know verifiable facts about the physical world that there was no way their ordinary senses could tell them? What if this could be proved to me but for some reason not to the general public? I said I would worry about that when it happened. He asked if it would it violate my core beliefs? It would violate my understanding of the world, but my faith was stronger than that. Kamau said he knew of people with such abilities and felt obligated to tell me about them if we were going to be close. He could arrange a demonstration, or we could just let it drop. I hesitated. I didn't really want to know about such things, but also didn't want it to be something he had to keep hidden. In stories sometimes holy men have such powers, but more often it is demons. And I thought it was most likely that he was mistaken. I said I thought it would be best if he showed me and let me judge for myself. He said he would do that.

The next day he and I went over to Eliska's apartment for dinner. It was a nice place and a bit fancier than I expected. With real furniture. She had made knedliky, a big Czech dumpling that had to be sliced as soon as it was done, along with boiled cabbage and roasted carrots, turnips, onions and peppers. Afterward we sat in the living room and he asked me to think of a song. I said what? He said think of song and hear it in my head. So I did. Eliska said it wasn't a tune she knew, but it had a Middle Eastern scale. She could sing it if I liked. I sat there with my mouth open. Eliska? I still didn't believe it and didn't know why they were doing this. I thought it might be best not to continue but said please go ahead. She did. It was a well known song. It might have been a lucky guess. Kamau asked me to try another song. I did. I tried several, both Eastern and Western. She knew what they were each time. I said I didn't understand. She said she didn't understand it either. It was just something she could to. She could get inside music. For a long time she had thought everyone could. After she learned they couldn't, she had learned to hear it in other people's heads, if she tried to. I asked if there were other people who could do this? She said she didn't know of any, but some people could do other things. Like what? Kamau said he could communicate with certain African animals, such as elephants and aardvarks, but there weren't any around here. I said like Dr Dolittle? He said no. He could sense their location and their sensations and feelings, but they could also sense him if he wasn't careful. It worked both ways.

I asked if people could hear music in Eliska's head? She said Kamau did when they played together. She could try to show me. I said go ahead. I became aware of a cello sonata in my head. I wasn't a piece I knew. Normally I would have assumed I had heard it somewhere and forgotten about it until it happened to come back. I sang a little of the melody and Eliska said yes, that was it. As I kept listening and she stopped thinking of it, I became vaguely aware of a great many pieces of music, all separate and all sitting there in Eliska head, some of which I knew. I said ya salaam, the music! Eliska said oh, and it stopped. I said I was sorry. She said she needed to be more careful. Broadcasting could cause problems. I asked about Jeremiah. They said they thought he was normal. I asked about Grace. Eliska said she didn't know, but a disproportionate number of people they met seemed to have special abilities. She thought it was disproportionate, they had no way to measure. Kamau had said they couldn't show other people. Why not? Kamau said the abilities tended not to work in situations that would make them known. Reality protected itself. And they only seemed to appear in people who would respect them. Why could they tell me? Kamau said it was because I good person. Eliska said it was because I was emotionally mature, but maybe that was the same thing. She asked if I had a special ability? I said I hoped not, then apologized. Kamau said they were a gift that came with certain responsibilities, like any other talent, but were theirs to enjoy. Maybe I had already noticed something extra in the music when Eliska played. I said maybe I had.

I said given the situation, there was something I needed to ask Eliska. I couldn't think of any way to do so that wasn't offensive. I was sorry. It was about about her reputation. She looked a little sad but said go ahead. I said Kamau made it seem that she had a large number of lovers. I had thought it wasn't any of my business, or his, but now I understood that it was. If we were going to be part of a close intimate group, it would affect me, or maybe my attitude about it would affect me. If she were a man most people wouldn't think much about it, but I would. It went against my upbringing, but then so did the whole idea of this group I wanted to join. Maybe I was trying to do too much too fast. Eliska said maybe I was, but she didn't think so. She heard music in people's minds. She had always done it but hadn't realized it until the last few years. And not fully until even more recently. Kamau said a woman could tell how good a lover a man was by the way he danced. She could tell how good a person a man was by his music. Eyes are the window of the soul, but music is the essence of the soul. If she liked being inside a man's mind, she wanted him to be inside her body. She already loved him. She loved women too, but they couldn't give her this. Things always worked out, even if they didn't last. For a moment I couldn't say anything. I remembered sharing music with Lisa and Stephen. It wasn't the same, but it helped me understand. Then I whispered it was beautiful. I didn't know. She said now I did.

We waited several weeks until school was out to hold our ritual. Kamau's schedule was flexible, but the others had concerts on weekends. Finally on a tuesday night we all gathered at Jeremiah and Kamau's apartment for dinner. It was on the third floor of an old brick building and smaller than Eliska's. Kamau gave drum lessons here if they weren't outside or at the music store. There was a fair sized living room with a large bay window covered by gauzy curtains, a sofa long enough for Kamau, a dresser, and several drums. Behind it was a small kitchen. A window over the sink looked across a large light well into the bedroom, which was reached by a long narrow but well lit corridor to one side. I brought pomegranate juice and Grace brought almond cookies. Eliska showed up last with two large pizzas, one with onion, pepper and mushroom, and one Greek with feta, olives, spinach, tomato and onion. We all crowded around their small table. It was a student area and sometimes noisy, but Jeremiah worked mostly afternoons and evenings so he didn't mind too much. He liked it because it was close to the symphony. Kamau said the noise didn't bother him. After we finished we moved over to the living room and tried playing some Middle Eastern music. I had loaned Grace a CD so she could get used to the sound of a spike fiddle. I had played with Kamau before. His djembe was a good substitute for a tombak although his normal playing style was different. Eliska knew Eastern European music since she was Czech and had studied many other styles. Jeremiah had borrowed another CD and said he would do the best he could. With Eliska's help they could all hear the music in my head and the part they would try to play.

A radio host once asked her guest how Beethoven could write music when he was deaf and couldn't hear what it sounded like. The guest said Beethoven knew exactly what it sounded like even though he had never heard it. The host had no idea what he was talking about and asked the same question over again. All classically trained musicians can tell what written music sounds like, some better than others. But music is a sensual experience. Knowing what it sounds like and hearing it are two different things. Any child with a favorite song knows this. Would you be content with just memories of sex? Hearing it in my head wasn't enough. We needed to play the music ourselves. Eliska took the vocal line. Her cello starts slowly with the drum and oud backing it, then skipped a couple verses. The oud starts the next section. The violin joins, then the cello. We go back and forth. We skipped ahead to a faster section with viola, oud and drum. The cello comes back. The viola trades off to the violin. The next section slows down again. The last section is faster, louder, and more rhythmic. I thought we did well, considering. The next piece starts off fast with drum, oud, fiddle and viola. The cello comes in with the vocal line. It does a duet with the fiddle. The fiddle takes a solo. We all go back and forth, then join together at the end. Everyone seemed pleased with the result. We had some tea and more almond cookies.

Jeremiah put on some Piazzolla. Kamau and I sat on the carpet. Jeremiah sat on the sofa between Grace and Eliska. I was nervous. Kamau moved behind me with his legs stretched out on either side and put his arms around me. I leaned back against him. Jeremiah looked at Grace, then at Eliska, then turned and kissed Grace. We all watched them. I took off my headscarf. These people were family now. I wouldn't need to wear it when I was with them. Kamau kissed the side of my neck. I tilted my head away to give him room. Jeremiah and Grace were still kissing. They had their arms around each other, and Eliska was cuddled up to his side. Kamau nibbled my ear the way I liked. He put one hand on the opposite breast and moved the other between my legs. Eliska started squeezing Jeremiah's erection through his pants. I reached down and undid my jeans. Kamau reached inside, stroked my panties, reached inside, stroked my crotch, slipped his finger inside, wet it, and stoked my clitoris. I arched back against him. Eliska had Jeremiah's penis out and was contemplating it. She stood up and looked at me. She undid her shorts and slid them off. She had on a red body suit with skimpy red panties beneath and no bra. Grace was aware of what she was doing. Eliska moved over to where Grace could see her better while still kissing Jeremiah. Eliska was bigger and than either Grace or me. Well yes, but also taller and heavier. She slid the straps off either shoulder, slowly pushed the suit off her breasts, down her ribs, over her hips, along her thighs, and swayed to either side as she stepped out of it. She repeated the process in abbreviated form with her panties and dropped them on top of the suit. Her pubic hair was full and a matching dark blond, her nipples pink and prominent. She smiled at Grace and me and headed down the corridor to the bedroom. She went slowly enough that anyone looking into the corridor window from across the light well would have gotten a good glimpse. I decided to wait until I got to the bedroom to finish undressing. I swam in the pool without a headscarf or bathing cap, so I didn't worry about putting that back on. As Kamau and I stood up, I saw that Grace was already getting out of her clothes and folding them neatly.

Eliska was lying face down on the far side of the naked queensize bed. Her head was turned toward the door and her eyes were half closed, as if to give us an illusion of privacy. The bedside lamp was dim but still bright enough to see colors clearly. The sheet was sage green and there were lots of pillows. I noticed there was a clear view from the window into the kitchen but not to either side or above, at least not from the bed. I needed to remember not to stand on the near side of it when I was undressed. Eliska turned her head to face us as Kamau and I took off our clothes. I gave her a full view but didn't put on a show. She kept her back to us as when we climbed over the end of the bed into the middle. I bumped her little since we needed to leave room for the others. I started kissing and exploring Kamau again. My hand had gotten to his lower back when Grace and Jeremiah came in a minute later. It continued to his buttock. Grace and I watched each other as they lay down. The boys seemed oblivious, or preoccupied, or maybe patient. Grace and I didn't stare, but our eyes met occasionally. She was very beautiful and not as delicate as she looked. The scent of her excitement mingled with everyone else's. Jeremiah was gentle and slow. Still, they started before we did. His buttocks pressed into her and she rose to meet him, sometimes with a slight grunt. Eliska turned her head and watched all of us with her half closed eyes. I remembered Scheherazade's sister, who had watched each night while the king satisfied his lust. I remembered my roommate, who had tried to keep me out but hadn't stopped when I went in anyway. Kamau put on a condom, and I scooted over in what room I had while he held himself up out of the way. Grace had kept her legs low, so I lifted mine up on either side of Kamau, over her and Eliska, before I spread them wide. He lowered himself carefully and entered my moist readiness. It was like before and different in ways I can't describe. Grace's breathing got faster and she squinted her eyes each time she came. Jeremiah had a high pitched grunt when he did. Then I started. At some point later Jeremiah got up and walked around the bed. There was as much room on one side as the other. Eliska was ready, and before long so was he. And then so was Kamau, and I felt him pumping hot cum into me.

Eliska was enthusiastic and merciless. Jeremiah tried to keep up. Well, not keep up exactly. As far as I could tell he didn't have a problem with that. Neither did Kamau. But eventually he slid out, visited the bathroom, and slid in next to Grace. I heard them, but I knew what both of them looked like, so I kept watching Eliska and Jeremiah. She started to get close, held on, and spasmed and gasped as she came. She slowed some but held on and kept going. Every so often I saw her body shake with little spasms. Her gasps had turned into more of a whimper, and I watched a tear drip from her eye. I didn't know. The next thing I knew I was waking up from someone bumping me. I remembered where I was. Eliska was still going at it, but now in the center of the bed with Kamau on top. I was on the far side facing them. The light was still on. Eliska was more Kamau's size, but she was quite pale. They were actually too close for me to see very well. I could feel their body heat. I noticed Grace and Jeremiah watching from the other side. They had pulled a cream colored sheet over themselves, and someone had put one over me. When he saw I was awake he got up, walked around the bed, and sat down next to me. Grace glanced up, smiled a little, and went back to watching the others. Nothing happened. After a few moments I turned my head and looked up. He looked scared or tentative. I remembered his music reflected through Eliska when they played together in the quartet. I remembered him with Grace and Eliska and started to get excited. My training took over.

In Iraq most marriages are more or less arranged. Jeremiah was nicer, and younger, than anyone my father would have chosen. My mother had taught me the proper way to behave. The situation was different, but her instructions helped. I said we didn't have to do this right now if he didn't want to, but I whispered so Grace wouldn't hear and would assume I was the one who wasn't ready. This seemed to reassure him. He got in behind me and I felt his hand on my hip, his body lightly touching me. I turned over carefully and kissed him, letting him know that this was what I wanted. I felt his tongue caress my own and his arm move around me. My hand moved down his side. I felt the bottom in his ribs, the side of his abdomen, the hollow of his groin, the soft scratchiness of his pubic hair, and the base of his extended penis. His balls were held tightly in their sack and moved around freely. The shaft was still slimy with Grace and Eliska, in spite of the condoms. Above the ridge, the tip was moist with a fresh drop that I spread around with a swirling motion, adding to the slickness of my fingers. I slowly and gently stroked back down the shaft with my thumb and fingers, and continued stroking. I could feel the beat of his pulse, and his hips started pushing forward and back. I whispered I was ready, and he paused to put on a condom. The sheet dropped back to the floor. I spread my legs and guided him into me. I held his buttocks and felt the muscles thrusting slowly forward and releasing back. I answered him. At some point later I heard Kamau and Eliska finish. I found I had been hearing her all along as she and I traded orgasms. And then I lost track again of everything except movement and touch and being filled. Suddenly Jeremiah was pushing harder and exploding inside of me as I pushed back and held his body tightly against mine.

It was a strange sort of harem. A harem is supposed to be the women's part of the house, but Eliska, Grace and I all lived separately, while Kamau and Jeremiah shared an apartment. Except I lived with Lisa, who was in some way my wife, at least for as long as I could keep her interested. The Western idea of a harem is a private whore house with a marble bathing pool, and comes from nineteenth century Orientalist paintings and sex comedies of the fifties and early sixties. That is even stranger.

Listen. After the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in World War Two, the British created and occupied Iraq. The Kurds and Shiites rebelled, so they installed a minority Sunni leadership. In 1968 AD the Sunnis rebelled, created a republic, and established relations with the USSR. A few years later Saddam Hussein rose to power and purged his opponents. Seeing the replacement of the US backed Shah of Iran by a Shiite government as a threat, he declared war and was supported by the USSR, France, and the Reagan and Bush administrations, although the US and USSR also supplied arms to Iran. He also attacked the Kurds and Assyrians in his own country, but it wasn't until he seized Kuwait's oil supplies that the west turned against him.

Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and even Reagan with their wars and draft don't seem that much different from Joseph Kony or Charles Manson with their messianic dreams and kidnapped child soldiers, except that Kennedy and Reagan are still viewed as messiahs in this country, and now there is a back door draft where suicide is the only way out for many veterans. Which is not to say other leaders are any better. When you come down to it, it is pretty much the same in all times and all places. It's called the human condition. Wars are made by elites herding peasants in front of themselves, more or less as human shields, and the distinction between soldier and civilian is mostly imaginary. Between wars they hold parades and pretend it's worth it. Anyone who points out the obvious is called a pessimist or a dreamer or a coward or, if enough people listen to start another war, a messiah.

A relatively few fanatics have brought the most powerful nation on Earth to its knees. Even though you could produce enough food to feed all of your people, you don't. Many of them are hungry, and it's not because they are lazy. What would happen if a significant portion of the poor peoples of the world rose up? How far away does your food come from? There is not nearly enough food at the farmers market to feed everyone, and a lot of that is not local. It's much easier to destroy something than to build it. Saying it's not going to happen or praying to your gods does not give you some sort of magic immunity. Your whole civilization could be destroyed before you even realize what's happening. Mine was.

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