Mohammed had been sitting outside on a rock for about a thousand years when Youssef pushed his way from the tent to join his brother. For nearly a hundred years, Mohammed had been waiting on the rock while Youssef deflowered virgin number seventy-two, taking her every-which-way his imagination would allow. In the sand at his feet, Mohammed was using a stick to draw letters and figures, while he listened to the grunting and groaning, screaming and moaning, biting and panting. Sometimes, while watching a passing caravan or grinning at the vulture who hunched and returned his grin, Mohammed would lean back and yell: “Youssef! Youssef! Have you not had enough of her?” In a way, he didn’t mind Youssef’s nonsense. Without the sound of bombs detonating in the distance, or the burst of machine gun spray, the silence sometimes drove Mohammed to the brink of madness, so it was a relief to hear his brother’s noisy exertions.
When Youssef was done, he emerged naked from the tent carrying a clay pitcher of water in one hand and his robe draped over the opposite arm. He took a long draught from the pitcher, letting the water spill from the sides of his mouth and down his neck and chest and legs, and dribbling it in pools around his feet where it disappeared into the sand. He let out a satisfied “Ahhh” and threw himself onto the ground beneath the rock’s shade.
“Mohammed,” he said. He snatched the stick from his brother and snapped it in two, then threw both halves at the vulture. The vulture hopped back two paces, then inched forward to its original perch.
“Mohammed, how long has it been since you deflowered your seventy-second?”
Mohammed did some reckoning in his head, and then he did some more with his fingers. “At least fifteen hundred years.”
“Don’t you miss it?”
Mohammed yawned.
Youssef laughed and poked at his brother with a dirty finger. “Do you still remember that day long ago when you achieved your immortality?”
Sometimes it was a pleasure to while away a year or two reminiscing about the old days. They remembered how they had given their lives for the faith. Youssef had boarded a bus in Haifa with C-4 strapped to his chest and a dead-man’s switch in his left hand. He hadn’t shaved for days just so he could sport the wild-eyed fanatical look that seemed to be part of the job description. In fact, he wasn’t much of a wild-eyed fanatic; he was more of a mamma’s boy who was enrolled at a good university and liked to play RPG’s with all his online friends. For his part Mohammed had worn a knapsack into a marketplace on a Friday morning where he detonated a nail bomb.
Youssef laughed. “I remember, brother, when your head flew off. It landed in a stack of watermelons.” He slapped his thigh and wiped a tear from his eye. “And your testicles! Why, they were lost in a bin of peaches.”
“But this virgin business!” said Mohammed.
“Yes?”
“This virgin business. It’s not everything I would have expected.”
“You speak the truth, my brother.”
“After a few thousand years, it gets tiresome.”
Youssef said nothing in return. Instead, they listened to the warm breeze sweeping across the sand.
“They start out knowing nothing, and they’re more afraid than eager. With the first two or three, you think: ‘What an opportunity! I can teach them to please me in just the way I want.’ But it’s no good.”
“No.” And Youssef shook his head in agreement.
“Because sometimes I want inventiveness, spontaneity. Sometimes I wish we’d gotten seventy-two old whores instead.”
“Mohammed! You’re treading close to blasphemy.”
But Mohammed was animated and didn’t hear his brother. “And then they get ideas!”
“Ideas.” Youssef knew exactly what his brother meant.
If you spent a century or two deflowering one of your virgins, it gave the other seventy-one time to talk amongst themselves and to read authors like Gloria Steinem and Nadine Gordimer. They started to make demands. They started to say things like: “I’m a person too, and my pleasure counts for something.” If one of the virgins spoke to you in that way, and if you raised a hand to strike her so that she would know her proper place, then the other seventy-one would rise up to defend her and they would tear you to shreds. There is nothing more pernicious, either in this world or in the one before, than seventy-two angry virgins.
“It would be better to pay them and be done with it.”
Youssef nodded. “I’m inclined to agree with you my brother.”
A man was approaching, still far off on the desert road. Mohammed noticed first. He squinted and pointed to the horizon. “It’s reverend Jerry!” he shouted.
At first, just a shimmering speck on the hot sand, the man’s features grew more distinct as he approached. On Earth, he had been a portly man with fat pinkish cheeks and perfect hair, but all that had changed in the afterlife. With so much time at his disposal, the reverend Jerry had undertaken a vigorous exercise program. He liked to go on long walks. One of his more legendary strolls had taken almost a millennium. And because he loved to walk in the full glare of the heavenly light, his hair was bleached and his face was a leathery brown, with crow’s feet around the eyes that came from squinting down desert roads.
Youssef poked at his brother. “It could be worse. We could have suffered his reward.”
Mohammed grinned and nodded.
For the reverend Jerry, the afterlife had demanded many adjustments. He had risen to the challenge of a porcine build in a desert clime, but he had struggled with the more troublesome fact that the “Sons of Righteousness” (as the club was called) included men with names like Mohamed and Youssef. But most difficult of all was a little revelation delivered by an Angel of the Lord. It was in the early days when the reverend Jerry had first arrived. He had set out on a desert road, trying to get his bearings, and an Angel of the Lord had offered to show him a good time. With the light high overhead and beating down on Jerry’s still pinky flesh, the Angel had said unto him:
“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry. We really need to have a talk about your sexuality.”
That was when the Angel of the Lord revealed to the reverend Jerry that, right from the get-go, right from the moment his daddy’s sperm fertilized his mommy’s ovum, the Lord God Almighty of Heaven and Earth had ordained that the reverend Jerry should have a preference for men. But Jerry had turned his back on the Lord’s divine plan by sublimating his desires through an aggressive pursuit of religion and an unnatural love of food. Even in the afterlife, Jerry had continued his sublimating ways. The Lord had rewarded him with seventy-two virgins all his own (since, in his own way, he had been a terrorist of the first rank). They were fresh-faced young men who were eager to please. But Jerry would have none of it. Instead, he poured himself into his exercise regime, and as aeons passed, he developed rippling abs and a tight ass, but that seemed only to make things worse. He had tried to raid Mohammed’s and Youssef’s stables, but the women had only twittered and sent him on his way.
So the reverend Jerry had consigned himself to wander the desert sands. He had become hard and lean. And so it had gone on for nearly a thousand thousand years, and still he hadn’t managed to get laid.