ZERO

{Excerpt from Zero Gravity}

"Mohammed, Mohammed, Mohammed!"

Out of breath from fitting three names in her mouth all at once, she paused for a second and picked up her breath. On average, one of his names had double the syllables of a white man’s name, she had in fact said his name six times. He was not going to share this observation with her or rather he might ask why she had repeated it with such vehemence, maybe she had really wanted to say something else. Something like "Mohammed, I want you and I always have". And perhaps she didn’t dare say it or he hadn’t wanted to hear it. But given the unlikelihood of that and the context, which was clear enough to make out why she had needed to engage in this penalising pedantic tone, he dropped it.

It reminded him of his now long dead mother, while the dirt had surely struggled to reabsorb her enormous body, it needn’t deal with her voice, this one was lodged in his brain forever. His mother had had the fascinating ability to modulate pitch like an Austrian yodeller, reaching its highest when she was most mad. It rumbled through the house when as kids they were late for dinner, piercing their ears with the guilt of not grazing like an Arab.

Mohammed, with a name like that there was little in this world he couldn’t aspire to be. He could be a run-of-the-mill thug, a drug dealer, a people smuggler, a man of knowledge and character, an actor, a supporting actor, an undercover CIA agent, a doctor or a lawyer, a rapist, a terrorist, a refugee, an asylum seeker or a member of parliament who had entered through the back door. What he could not be was gay, Muslim and fair-skinned. So, he settled for a job at a local insurance company, a role which helped build a false sense of safety around others, enveloping them like a soft blanket, protecting them (and himself) from what would surely come.