Y.D.A.U. The legation finds the promotional subsidy of the North American calendar hilariously vulgar. To say nothing of the
arresting image of the idolatrous West’s most famous and self-congratulating idol, the colossal Libertine Statue, wearing
some type of enormous adult-design diaper, a hilariously apposite image popular in the news photos of so many international
journals.
The attaché’s medical practice being normally divided between Montreal and the Rub’ al Khali, it is his first trip back to
U.S.A. soil since completing his residency eight years ago. His duties here involve migrating with the Prince and his retinue
between InterLace’s two hubs of manufacture and dissemination in Phoenix, Arizona U.S.A. and Boston, Massachusetts U.S.A.,
respectively, offering expert E.N.T. assistance to the personal physician of Prince Q ——— . The medical attaché’s particular
expertise is the maxillofacial consequences of imbalances in intestinal flora. Prince Q ——— (as would anyone who refuses to
eat pretty much anything but Töblerone) suffers chronically from
Candida albicans,
with attendant susceptibilities to monilial sinusitis and thrush, the yeasty sores and sinal impactions of which require
almost daily drainage in the cold and damp of early-spring Boston, U.S.A. A veritable artist, possessed of a deftness nonpareil
with cotton swab and evacuation-hypo, the medical attaché is known among the shrinking upper classes of petro-Arab nations
as the DeBakey of maxillofacial yeast, his staggering fee-scale as wholly
ad valorem
.
Saudi consulting fees, in particular, are somewhere just past obscene, but the medical attaché’s duties on this trip are personally
draining and sort of nauseous, and when he arrives back at the sumptuous apartments he had his wife sublet in districts far
from the legation’s normal Back Bay and Scottsdale digs, at the day’s end, he needs unwinding in the very worst way. A more
than averagely devout follower of the North American sufism promulgated in his childhood by Pir Valayat, the medical attaché
partakes of neither kif nor distilled spirits, and must unwind without chemical aid. When he arrives home after evening prayers,
he wants to look upon a spicy and 100%
shari’a-halal
dinner piping hot and arranged and steaming pleasantly on its attachable tray, he wants his bib ironed and laid out by the
tray at the ready, and he wants the living room’s teleputer booted and warmed up and the evening’s entertainment cartridges
already selected and arranged and lined up in dock ready for remote insertion into the viewer’s drive. He reclines before
the viewer in his special electronic recliner, and his black-veiled, ethnically Arab wife wordlessly attends him, loosening
any constrictive clothing, adjusting the room’s lighting, fitting the complexly molded dinner tray over his head so that his
shoulders support the tray and allow it to project into space just below his chin, that he may enjoy his hot dinner without
having to remove his eyes from whatever entertainment is up and playing. He has a narrow imperial-style beard which his wife
also attends and keeps free of detritus from the tray just below. The medical attaché sits and watches and eats and watches,
unwinding by visible degrees, until the angles of his body in the chair and his head on his neck indicate that he has passed
into sleep, at which point his special electronic recliner can be made automatically to recline to full horizontal, and luxuriant
silk-analog bedding emerges flowingly from long slots in the appliance’s sides; and, unless his wife is inconsiderate and
clumsy with the recliner’s remote hand-held controls, the medical attaché is permitted to ease effortlessly from unwound spectation
into a fully relaxed night’s sleep, still right there in the recumbent recliner, the TP set to run a recursive loop of low-volume
surf and light rain on