Otared

by Mohammad Rabie

  That was true. Everyone had felt a great sense of relief when the name changed.

  Madi spoke calmly now. “It seems we’re in agreement. The process is much clearer now. We are trying to recreate the January troubles. We anticipate that people will attack occupation patrols and police stations. This time, the police will not resist the attacks, but will leave them to burn instead. Do they have instructions to do so? Certainly not. Do we have an understanding with them? Certainly not. But I know they will abandon the police stations to be looted by the crowds. Don’t worry. In a few short days, we shall celebrate the anniversary of the old ‘reverlooshun.’”

  “And when we’re done, maybe one of them will write a poem!” I said, laughing.

  “Maybe,” Madi replied, “There are plenty of fools about.”

  Then he smiled and turned to the youngest man there. “Do you remember any of the poetry from the January troubles, Lieutenant Ali?”

  A nervous grin spread across the man’s face and he half-turned toward al-Asyuti.

  “Don’t you worry,” Madi said. “We’re not in any official meeting now, and I shouldn’t think the major general will object to a little fun.”

  “I didn’t hear any at the time, sir,” said Lieutenant Ali, “It was years later. We used to hear that stuff from our classmates at the academy and then afterward we’d recite it.”

  Al-Asyuti said, “All right then, poet, give us what you’ve got. . . .”

  Lieutenant Ali cleared his throat, then raised his arms aloft like the poets do. “Slaughter me and leave me slain / It won’t restore your state again.” As he declaimed, he was brandishing his finger in the air like a pistol and I couldn’t hold back a grin. We had killed them and we had got our state back. “In my blood, and by my hand / I write a new life for my native land!” Now he was mashing his chest like a woman in the throes of sexual abandon. We cracked up, and finally I remembered the poem. It was a poem written by an obscure poet called Safaa al-Muweilhi in honor of the martyrs. I’d never forget that name. The lieutenant was still going: “This blood of mine or this Arab Spring . . . ?” He trailed his fingers down between his thighs and wiped at his crotch, then raised his palm to his face, opening his eyes wide as he inspected it. “Both are the hue of menstrual blood!”

  Al-Asyuti laughed a lot, then, coughing, asked: “Did the poet really write menstrual blood?”

  But the young man couldn’t answer and we couldn’t hear. The laughter was so loud that we worried we’d be found out. If the floor had been cleaner, I would have fallen down. I remembered the whore’s blood on me down in the bridge and I thought to myself that she must have been one of the “reverlooshunaries,” her eye taken out by the birdshot my colleagues had unleashed, that we’d maimed her like we’d maimed others. And now, the struggle, and the demonstrations, and the dollars she’d been paid for her treachery were all finished, and there she was: a whore in a bridge that I fucked for three pounds. A truly fitting end for a traitor.

  Still laughing, Ali raised his hand to excuse himself. This was the time we had waited for: vengeance for the January troubles preoccupied us to this day. Bit by bit, the laughter faded, then someone fluted in effeminate tones, “Marters of the reverlooshun . . . ,” and a fresh wave broke out.

  We heard a knocking at the door and, when one of us went to open it, in walked a young man carrying a large bag. Had the laughter given us away? The man was frowning but when he saw me he grinned, then looked at the scarab on my shoulder and nodded. “Looks like it’s in love!”

  “Looks like it’s dumped you!” I countered.

  So this was the officer in charge of the drones. The two snipers asked if they might leave and, after Suleiman Madi had spoken briefly to both of them, they shook hands with everyone and departed. The drone technician set his bag on the grimy table, opened it up, rummaged around inside for a while, then took out something resembling a long needle, a device like a cell phone, and a bunch of cables. He made straight for me and introduced himself. He was Major John Mokhtar, he said. He’d have the drone back under his control in less than a minute.

  This was shaping up to be an unusually cheery day despite the two bodies lying outside the building and the unhappy memories that had momentarily claimed us. The major apologized for the drone’s behavior. This was the best one he had, he said—extremely light and with low power consumption. It could convert solar energy to electricity and do the same thing with physical motion. That was why it had clung to my shoulder while I walked. A technological marvel, he said, but for some reason it had decided to ignore the remainder of its mission and keep me company.

  Madi had his response ready. “It’s no joke, Saint. You lost control of the drone. Others might be controlling it without our knowing. Isn’t it possible that someone might be spying on us right now?”

  The gravity of what Madi was suggesting passed me by. “Saint?” I asked John.

  “That’s the nickname they’ve given me because I haven’t killed anyone yet.”

  “How’s that possible?” I asked. “We’ve been under occupation for three years now. Have you really not killed anyone in all that time? An officer’s not a officer until he’s killed, my friend.”

  The Saint ignored me, a thin smile on his lips. He had finished connecting the drone to his device and was fiddling with it when he said, “Don’t worry about the drone. It can’t be used to spy on you. With this type, it’s impossible to take full control of its movement. We can only set the target location and it finds its own way there. It avoids roadblocks and flies over buildings, or it can hide until the sun comes out in order to recharge. The drone doesn’t let anyone restrict its movement. It will escape the first chance it gets and can immolate itself if it feels threatened. Ah! It seems the error was my fault. The command log seems to be saying it was me. Basically, I was negligent and forgot to give it the command to return, which is why it stayed with you. The extraordinary thing is that it actually kept you company instead of shutting down or flying off into the city.”

  “What’s extraordinary is that it was playing with me,” I said. “Like a pet I’d raised myself.”

  The Saint smiled. “It’s an incredible development. Drones can learn now. They can store any actions they see and imitate them. It must have seen a dog playing with its owner or something along those lines, then analyzed what it saw and decided to copy it.”

  He finished with the drone and looked at us. “All I want to say is that its presence here among you should be no cause for concern, and if you’d rather spare yourself the worry you could simply smash it, just as you could have done with earlier models. But no one did.”

  I was inspecting the drone in the palm of the Saint’s hand, when I heard Major General al-Asyuti ask, “Do you want to keep it?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  I didn’t think there would be any harm in keeping it.

  I asked the Saint what it was called, and he said, “Burhan.”

  “Leave it here, John,” al-Asyuti said. “It’ll keep the colonel entertained.”

  The Saint shrugged, then took a series of objects out of his bag and said, “This cell phone contains the program to control the drone. In the normal course of events, Burhan will stay with you and will probably rest on your shoulder most of the time. Don’t expect too much. He’s never going to open his mouth and say, ‘Burhan at your service, sir!’”

  I slipped the phone and the connecting cable into my pocket and turned to Kamal al-Asyuti and Suleiman Madi to ask if there were any other orders. Al-Asyuti gave a gentle smile and waved me away. I should enjoy my next few days in Cairo, he said, but I must be ready at all times. He reminded me that tomorrow was my only day off. Madi approached me. He told me that the Saint could help me get hold of lots of things and to call him if I was ever in need. Then he handed me a sealed envelope. It contained cash, he said—not much, but quite enough to live on for the next few days.

  Cash at last! It had been months since I’d paid
for anything. Those living in the tower had food, and drink, and hash delivered to them, and there’d been no need to carry any money. I remembered that I didn’t have any hash on me, then thought of the major. Would the Saint be able to get me some or would he think me a spendthrift, squandering government money on good times?

  Burhan—that’s right, it was Burhan now—went back to hovering quietly over my head, and when I left the apartment and went downstairs, he became more active. He looped faster and started to flip in midair, then found a new game: flying ahead a short distance at high speed, then holding his wings still and tucking them beneath the casings, at which his body would fall for all of a second or two before he reopened his wings and beat hard to float back up. Burhan was delighted that we were going back outside, it seemed.

  On the sidewalk opposite, four men stood smoking, one of them gazing at the ground while the others played with their phones. My instincts told me they were up to no good, out to burgle an apartment or break into a car, to snatch a woman or a child. Their movements betrayed nerves and their preoccupation with what they were holding was unconvincing. But why should I care? I wasn’t an officer now and I had to prepare myself for the revolution ahead.

  It was nearly 10 p.m. A headache was inching through my head. I recognized the usual signs: perfect mental clarity for a few seconds, followed by a headache, then hammer blows of pain striking the back of my skull every few minutes—I would barely have recovered from the first when the next struck. I must have hash. Regular painkillers might not get rid of it and, if I did take them, they might send me off to sleep, and I had no desire to rest. Hash, though, would make me forget the headache, would leave me calm, capable of laying plans for what was going to take place a few days from now.

  I took out the phone I’d been given at the meeting to search for the Saint’s number and discovered that his was the only name saved in its memory. I called him. He asked me where I was, then said he’d be down in just a minute.

  Two of the smoking men went into the building opposite. The other two stayed put, waiting for something. From the building’s narrow entrance emerged a massive individual, his jutting belly and two huge arms clearly visible, and his face hidden in the shadows that fringed the street. He seemed to be making sure of his surroundings. He looked at the street and at me. For a full minute, he didn’t stir, then he went back in. I turned to my right to find the Saint standing there, watching the man as I’d been doing. That man, he told me, guarded the door of the brothel across the street. Then, slipping his arm through mine, he led me out of the alley.

  We heard waves of pounding electronic music, a blend of human screams and animal shrieks—I thought I heard a pig and the sound of a dog howling in pain—interspersed with short musical loops and synthetic drumbeats, metallic and harsh. The source of this din came closer as we walked along, as though I was slipping down a huge metal slide with nothing to check my speed, and then we were right beside it and I heard a voice whispering between the bursts of sound, “Water . . . I’m thirsty . . . ,” and then we were moving away again, the music gradually dying away and the voice ever fainter: “Water . . . I’m thirsty. . . .” That voice was a sample, taken from an old film, perhaps, or a television drama where the lead actor asks someone for water. Maybe a dying man requesting a last drink. It occurred to me that the animal sounds were the sounds of copulation, a fat pig covering his sow, a bitch howling beneath a street dog’s thrusts, the sounds of a female in ecstasy or a male approaching the point of ejaculation. I asked the Saint about it. “It’s the new electronica. The guy who makes it is about forty, not a kid like you might expect. You must have heard of him. Abadir—a very distinctive name. He’s been around for more than fifteen years, but he’s always developing his music, never settles on one style. Those are the sounds of animals being killed. Abadir usually makes recordings in the street, then layers them over his music afterward: pavement sellers, passengers on the metro and public buses, government workers shouting at citizens—he captures all sorts of sounds and adds them in.”

  The Saint fell silent. I was amazed by how wrong I’d been. Although there were similarities between cries of sexual congress and the screams of the dying, the conclusion I’d jumped to was unsettling.

  “Abadir recorded a donkey expiring in the street after being hit by a car,” the Saint went on, “and as usual he mixed it into his music. The track was a huge hit, so this time he decided to record the sound of pigs being slaughtered. As you no doubt know, the police discovered a huge pig farm out in al-Marg in North Cairo and they were worried about the swine flu spreading again, so they slaughtered them all in a single day. Because they were scared of being infected, and to cut down on costs, they forced the owners and the workers to carry out the executions. Forced them to batter their skulls with hammers till they were dead. Abadir recorded several hours of the sounds the pigs made as they were being bumped off. It’s a great track, and it ends with this incredible crescendo. Abadir said he was recording the pigs shrieking while they were being bludgeoned, and then, in among the screaming, he started picking up the sounds of the farm workers weeping. They were hitting and weeping. Then the shrieking died down, and the pigs gave up and stopped trying to escape, and the workers stopped crying and just surrendered to the killing frenzy. And then, slowly but surely, they started screaming from sheer euphoria—the dirtiest insults and abuse directed at the pigs. Abadir said he saw one of them hammering at a pig with the most incredible violence. The pig’s skull had already been completely smashed in, and there was just no need to go on pulping the flesh and bone. When the man stopped and turned around, Abadir saw this huge damp patch on his trousers from his crotch down to his knees, and on his shirt up to the belly. The guy had come in his pants. Near the end, Abadir recorded a voice muttering in perfect Arabic, ‘Water . . . I’m thirsty . . . ,’ and he used that recording to end the track you’ve just heard.”

  The Saint’s words distracted me from my headache and I asked him how I could get hold of the music. The curiosity was killing me. “Couldn’t be easier,” he said. “When we get home, I’ll transfer the files onto your phone and give you some speakers so you can listen to it when you’re on your own.”

  We walked on in silence. All I could think of was the hash. Saint John might be a stoner, but then again he might be a proper saint who’d never touched the stuff in his life. The streets were calm, free of pedestrians, cars, and occupation patrols. On we went, and not once did he ask me what I wanted or where we were going, and only when the periods of pain were longer than the periods of clearheadedness did I ask about the hash.

  He said nothing for a while, and I told myself that I’d lost nothing since I had nothing to lose in the first place. Without looking at me, he said, “Getting hold of hash now will be difficult. The dealers reckon it’s easier to move about during the day. The night doesn’t hide them, but the crowds that come out in the day do. I’ll take you to a dealer tomorrow morning. You won’t get anything now. Only karbon.”

  He pulled a regular cigarette pack from his pocket, extracted a single, neatly hand-rolled specimen, lit it, and took a drag, then blew out a cloud of intensely thick, white smoke and reached out to hand it to me.

  At first, I assumed karbon must be the name of some kind of high-quality hash—you only share the good stuff with friends, after all, to avoid embarrassment if the friend turns out to know his varieties and to demonstrate your generosity, sincere or sham. But with the first drag I knew it wasn’t hash. The taste and smell were completely different from what I was used to; it didn’t burn the throat and lungs, or make me cough, and the smoke didn’t fill my nose with that pungent smell, didn’t branch out through my chest, bringing tidings of the calm to come. This stuff had an unfamiliar, organic smell. For some reason, I thought of grilled shrimp—thin shells seared on the flame. Then there was a blend of other aromas, none of which I could identify. This was something different.

  I took three drags and handed it to
the Saint, who glanced at me as we walked along and asked, “So, what’s the news?” I thought for a moment and said that current affairs didn’t interest me any more, and he laughed and was just explaining that he’d been talking about the karbon when suddenly I found my head surrounded by a dense black cube.

  Like marble, the cube was heavy, but it wasn’t cold to the touch. It was completely without temperature, in fact. I reached out my hand to feel its square sides and found them absolutely smooth and regular, the edges and corners sharp beneath my fingertips, and yet I couldn’t see a thing, or hear a sound, or utter the simplest word. I tried breathing, but there was no air inside this box—the cube was completely sealed, and my head was not so much inside it as part of it. Then the cube expanded, absorbing my neck, and chest, and belly, then further, down to my feet, and now I was completely cut off from my surroundings, not thinking of the Saint, or my mission, or anything else, but I could see myself, wedged beneath a vast mountain of pitch black and whispering, “Water . . . I’m thirsty. . . .”

  Then everything went away and I lost awareness. Awareness, but not consciousness; I remained awake, my senses disordered, and I discovered that I had forgotten everything that had gone before, that my head was emptied of its memories, that I couldn’t recall my name, or language, or even what I looked like. For a brief instant, I recalled that there were many things in the world outside the cube, but what I had been before I entered it I could not say. I was within the cube, in the nothingness that came before creation or the nothingness that came after its obliteration. It really didn’t matter, for the two nothingnesses were one.

  Then I heard the Saint. Talking about something. And just like that, my surroundings returned and with them the headache, fainter now and on its way out.

  Without warning, the Saint halted, so I halted, too, and he looked at me, smiling. “You just had a karbon trip!” I stared at him, amazed at everything that had happened—the black cube, the sensory shutdown, leaving the physical world—then looked at my fingers and saw the cigarette there, reduced to clinging ashes, and I said, “What is that?”