ACT 5 ___________________________

Scene 1. Terrible noise of WAR offstage - gunfire, missiles, explosions, shouts of men. We hear MICHAEL and QATHAFI offstage, voiceovers. MICHAEL (Voiceover) Iblees Marid! QATHAFI (Voiceover) No! The gunfire and explosions finally stop, and we hear the unmistakeable sounds of the two men fighting hand to hand, with grunts and thumps like theyre being thrown to the ground. They crash out on to the open stage, dressed as before in their battle fatigues and armor, rolling around on the ground in a mighty struggle. MICHAEL Damn you! QATHAFI Damn you, Jinn! MICHAEL You dont have a chance. QATHAFI I never did. Not with all of you - Finally, Michael pins him with his hands behind his back, and Michael handcuffs them, and puts his boot to Qathafis neck, holding him down, and still almost, after a violent struggle to get free. Then he holds him down painfully, brutally with his knee in his back. MICHAEL Stop it. Stop struggling. Youll just hurt yourself more. Im not going to kill you. Youre going for trial. And I dont mean with some lawyers from Benghazi or the World Court at The Hague, which will take years.

QATHAFI Trial? I spit on your justice. AlQaeda, Zionist entity. MICHAEL No. No. Youre not going to have the satisfaction of any humane courtroom. Hold still. It takes a warrior to know when hes beaten. QATHAFI Unlike your covert armies. I am Set the Typho, you can never kill me. MICHAEL No youre not. Q What? M Youre not Set. Thats preposterous. Q Whoever is an enemy of Gabriel (who has by Allahs grace revealed to you, Mahomet, the Koran as a guide and joyful tidings for the faithful, confirming previous scriptures), whoever is an enemy of Allah, His angels, or His apostles, or of Gabriel or Michael, shall make Allah Himself his enemy: Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers. M That doesnt make sense. Im Michael, after all. Q Says you. Alif lam mim. The holy suras of the - M Oh now youre a good Muslim when its convenient? Q When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield strike off their heads and, when you have laid them low, bind your captives firmly. Then grant them their freedom or take ransom from them, until War shall lay down her armour. M You will be granted only the freedom that the Lord of the Dead will decree. Q Hades? The evil abductor of Persephone, you mean?

M Clever boy. He whom you call the god Set, Typhoane the Python Apophis of Delphi and Abydos, is long gone, far far away from here, and from any worthless dog of a murdering coward like you. Q Nevertheless, I am He, whether you like it or not. You are the impostor angel Iblees Satan, the Marid, not I. I killed your beloved fool Osiris, which makes me -M (steps hard on his neck, making him scream) Silence, scorpion! Q Hes been in my prisons, or, rather, American dungeons somewhere, and wasted away long ago. Sharif Muhammad, my ass. M When Osiris was still a young man, long ago, his fellow Immortal thrust a fateful dagger into his brain, at his left temple, to inaugurate the long nights journey of 12 hours into Tuat. Q I know that Underworld. I wrote about it in my autobiography Escape to Hell. And The Green Book, about the green mummy too. M The blade writhed into his brain and spinal cord like the Kundalini serpent. Q And youre saying that was doing him a favor? I dont think so. M It was the crucial immortalizing process, that led to ATems healing by the first light of dawn. Adam. After surviving Tuat. Q Thats what I wrote about - Hell. I know it well. Quote: This is the city: a mill that grinds down its inhabitants . . . Children are worse off than adults. They move from darkness to darkness; from three darknesses to the fourth, as in the Quran. M

His agony and mutilation was imposed in a single night, and then he was free the next morning. It had nothing to do with your jails and the beatings by your thugs, and CIA friends. You had no power over him. Q (still quoting, on the ground, under Ms boot) O wise, kind-hearted people . . . humanitarians: have mercy on children, and do not deceive them by making them live in the city. Do not let your children turn into mice, moving around from hole to hole, from sidewalk to sidewalk. This is the true story for their hating you, Libyans: you are not of this world, you are not wealthy, and for this they hate you. You are not oppressors, and for this they hate you. You are not pretenders, so they hate you. You are not hypocrites or liars, and for this they hate you. M Im not going to kill you, no matter how much I want to. Im no pacifist like Osiris. Q (quoting himself) Although the world of the incapable has no meaning and no effectiveness, is null and void and silly . . . and although they create nothing and change nothing . . . despite all of this, the world of these incapable ones is the richest, most fertile, most teeming, and full of literary meaning. For the world of these people - that you represent Jinni Angel has its culture: it has an ability to accumulate psychologies and narratives of literature, myth, and metaphysics.

M You are going to stand trial before the Lord of the Dead, at the moment just before your death so that you will know everything. Q (quoting, scornful of Michael) Revolution: when feelings of impotence penetrate every part of the life of the incapable, and they lose the feeling of impotence and the decline that it involves. When neglect, ignominy, and baseness fail to provoke, the life of the impotent reaches zero, a static level of silliness and marginality. The countdown to approaching nothingness begins . . . M The ultimate justice. Q (quoting)

How beautiful the village and countryside are! Clean air, the horizon before you, the heavens without pillars thou canst behold (Quran, sura thirteen, verse two) with their divine lanterns above. M Lets go. Q (still quoting, as he stands weakly, handcuffed) The tyranny of the masses is the harshest type of tyranny. I love the freedom of the masses, as they move freely with no master above them. M Madness. You are the tyrant, delusional - Q (screaming) What terror! My people love me, they love me, all! Conflagration, a society that loves you yet will never show you mercy! M Mercy? Q What can I, a poor Bedouin hope for in a modern city of insanity?

M Poor Bedouin? Youve squandered trillions of dinars on yourself. Q People snap at me whenever they see me: build us a better house! Get us a better telephone line! Build us a road upon the sea! Make a public park for us! A poor, lost bedouin, without even a birth certificate, with his staff upon his shoulder. A bedouin, who will not stop for a red light, nor be afraid when a policeman takes hold of him. Go on, policeman, take me away. I welcome it. I will now tell you the story of my experiences when I made that journey too, that you spoke of, that escape to hell, so that you will know what made the anteater Seth a murderer of God. How can that be, I ask you? Why would anyone want to kill a kindly soul like your Muhammad Osiris? It is not out of jealousy, or a lust for power, as you say. It is for his own good, you say? Have you pretended to be someone else too, Sir, like, Horus the Pharaoh, perhaps? Why would you pretend to that? Or to a black dog like Anubis, and call me crazy? I know, I know, I can hear your argument - I am a clever fellow. I am very good at rhetoric. I

question your head as a hawk, as a mere mask of a Myth that is not true. It cannot be true, that a hawk would be the son of an Osiris, who is never represented as any kind of animal, alone among the hundreds of crazy Egyptian animal gods. And Im insane? Im the madman? You dont see me going around with dog and hawk and ibis heads, like Thoth. Thats really a goofy one. What does an ibis bird have to do with Thoth, or Hermes, or whoever you incapable, impotent ones say he is. I am. And how about Jesus, the Pontifex Maximus, the Christ, the Pope in Rome? Ive heard that myth too. He is Caesar, the Dictators Son, who killed million of Gauls alone in just that one war. How is he the pacifist of Caesarea Philippi, even if hes the son of the Divi Iulius, Divi Filius, ad altare Dei. And Herod the Great?! Hes coming out of the Osirian crucifixion I also fixed, if were to believe you, and thousands of years of Egypt and Libya. M Thats enough. You can rant and rave in your jail cell. Q Making too much sense, eh? Getting a little uncomfortable, warrior Archangel? Whatd you call, whod you call, God - ATem? Adam? Thats rich. So there I was, going down to Hell, Hades, Tuat, and it had wild, dark mountainsides, covered by fog. It was where the wretched Islamic masses will finally have their State.

Michael kicks Qathafi off stage finally. Fade out.