When Gravity Fails by George Alec Effinger

was that having Yasmin around all the time was getting to be enjoyable, but that didn’t fit the lone wolf’s profile.
    I said all of this to myself while I shaved my throat, looking in the bathroom mirror. I was trying to persuade myself of something, but it took me a while to do it. When I did, I wasn’t happy about my conclusion: I hadn’t accomplished very much during the last several days; but three times now, people had dropped dead near me, people I knew, people I didn’t know. If this trend went on, it could endanger Yasmin.
    Hell, it could endanger me.
    I had said that I thought Selima was getting excited over nothing. That was a lie. While Selima was telling me her story, I was recalling the brief, frantic phone call I’d gotten: “Marîd? You’ve got to—” I hadn’t been sure before that it had been from Nikki; but I was certain now, and I was feeling guilty because I hadn’t acted on it. If Nikki had been hurt in any way, I was going to have to live with that guilt for the rest of my life.
    I put on a white cotton gallebeya; covered my head with the familiar Arab headdress, the white keffiya, and held it in place with a rope akal. I put some sandals on my feet. Now I looked like every other poor, scruffy Arab in the city, one of the fellahîn, or peasants. I doubt if I’d dressed like this more than ten times in all the years I’d lived in the Budayeen. I’ve always affected European clothing, in my youth in Algeria and later when I’d wandered eastward. I did not now look like an Algerian; I wanted to be taken for a local fellah. Maybe only my reddish beard whispered a discordant note, but the German would not know that. As I left my apartment and walked along the Street toward the gate, I didn’t hear my name called once or catch a glance of recognition. As I walked among my friends, they did not know me, so unusual was it for me to dress this way. I felt invisible, and with invisibility goes a certain power. My uncertainty of a few minutes before evaporated, replaced by my old confidence. I was dangerous again.
    Just beyond the eastern gate was the broad Boulevard il-Jameel, lined with palm trees on both sides. A spacious neutral ground separated the north- and southbound traffic, and was planted with several varieties of flowering shrub. There was something blooming every month of the year, filling the air along the boulevard with sweet scents, distracting the eyes of those who passed by with their blossoms’ startling colors: luscious pinks, flaming carmine, rich pansy purple, saffron yellow, pristine white, blue as varied as the restless sea, and still more. In the trees and lodged high above the street on rooftops sang a multitude of warblers, larks, and ringdoves. The combined beauties moved one to thank Allah for these lavish gifts. I paused on the neutral ground for a moment; I had emerged from the Budayeen dressed as what I truly was—an Arab of few kiam, no great learning, and severely limited prospects. I had not anticipated the feeling of excitement this aroused in me. I felt a new kinship with the other scurrying fellahîn around me, a kinship that extended—for the moment—to the religious part of daily life that I had neglected for so long. I promised myself that I would tend to those duties very soon, as soon as I had the opportunity; I had to find Nikki first.
    Two blocks north of the Budayeen’s eastern gate in the direction of the Shimaal Mosque, I found Bill. I knew he’d be near the walled quarter, sitting behind the steering wheel of his taxi, watching the people passing by on the sidewalk with patience, love, curiosity, and cold fear. Bill was almost my size, but more muscular. His arms were covered with blue-green tattoos, so old that they had blurred and become indistinct; I wasn’t even certain what they had once represented. He hadn’t cut his sandy-colored hair or beard in years, many years; he looked like a Hebrew patriarch. His skin, where it was exposed to