A guide for the perplexed: a novel

by Dara Horn

  “Yes,” she said. Her voice shook. She sat up and spread her long and shapeless brown shirt across her lap, hoping he would not notice the puddle on the floor. She imagined herself crossing a long and narrow bridge, controlling the fear. “I’m a software developer.” I determine outcomes, she reminded herself. I decide what happens next. She felt a flutter in her chest, as though she were at a job interview. If she didn’t get this job, she would die.

  The man seated himself on the sarcophagus, hopping up onto it as though he were jumping onto the back of a pickup truck. He bumped his heels casually against the block of stone. “You write codes,” he said, stroking the stubble on his chin. He was wearing a different shirt, she noticed. His new shirt was solid black, with a collar and buttons. Perhaps this was a special occasion? She made a point of noticing his shirt, of checking the breast pocket for a brand (there wasn’t one), of clinging to anything that suggested a reality beyond the room, beyond her own body, holding tight to the rim of the world. He stared at her through dark sunglasses, his lips pursed. “Machine code,” he said, as if clarifying. “You write machine code.”

  “Machine code?” Josie asked. It had been years since she had attempted machine code. “I don’t—” But now a switch clicked in her brain: the crucial importance of not saying no, of not making another mistake. The answer, from now on, had to be yes, yes, yes—yes to everything, yes to the impossible. She needed to impress, to amaze, to exhibit at every opportunity her right to exist. “Do you mean programming languages? Like C? Or C-Sharp, or objective-C? Sure, I know those. Others too,” she said. The truth was that there were only one or two languages that she could really think in. Ten years ago she had come to understand that all the others were more or less the same, but with slightly different syntax, like dialects of a spoken language—and from then on she could learn a new one within a few days. Of course what really mattered now weren’t languages, but frameworks, not that she could even begin to explain that to this man—and of course these days she never had her hands in the weeds anymore. Coding was for her employees. But she thought of the beating, the hanging, the disemboweling mistake of telling the truth. She glanced at the sarcophagus and reaffirmed. “I know a lot about code.” But why on earth would he care about code?

  “What is objective-C?” the man asked.

  The cell had become a college computer lab. She looked at his scruffy sunglassed face and imagined him as a student, a twenty-year-old innocent who just wanted to know how things worked. It was surprisingly easy, as long as she didn’t look down at her bludgeoned, shackled leg. “Objective-C is a super­set of C, but object-oriented instead of procedure-oriented,” she said. Her words in this room were surreal, although coding was the opposite of surreal: man-made, controlled, entirely unmysterious to anyone who bothered to learn it, its supposed mysteries nothing more than revelations of one’s own inadequacy. That was what she had always loved about it—its intolerance for nonsense. “It’s used for mobile applications on Apple devices. C-Sharp is for all platforms except for Apple.” This was beyond irrelevant, she knew. But she sensed the possibility of awing him with irrelevance. It occurred to her that he had probably never even heard of C. The only way to avoid sneering was to imagine she was speaking to Tali. She pictured Tali, Tali’s smile, Tali’s sneer. But then she saw Tali once more with cake frosting on her arms and cheeks—the tug of the irra­tional, pulling her down, down, down below the surface of reality. She blinked her eyes. “They’re all just different ways of writing applications,” she heard herself say.

  The man leaned back, another smile spreading on his face. He was clearly confused, and impressed. Josie almost felt proud. “The machine code,” he nodded.

  “It isn’t machine code,” Josie said. The wave of accuracy surged within her, unstoppable, like nausea. Since childhood she had suffered from it. “Machine code is the internal binary programming that’s used in the physical processor. That’s not what C and the other languages do. They—”

  He held up his thin steel bat, the sort Josie remembered using in gym class, centuries ago, on another planet. She fell silent.

  “There is the police station of Cairo,” he said, almost thoughtfully. “The headquarters. Like in CSI.” As if he and Josie were friends, reminiscing about old TV shows, good times. This must be Cairo and not Alexandria, Josie reaffirmed to herself, pretending that it mattered. “You will help us. You will be our little helper.” He smiled at her. He liked to smile.

  Us, Josie heard. Did that mean the woman who might or might not be Nasreen? Or Bear Stearns, or Doctors Without Borders? Or was there some larger group of captors just beyond the door? He waited for her to reply, or to acknowledge him. But she was baffled, and terrified. She stared at the bat. A police station? Were they going to remove her from the room? She ran his words through her mind as though they were programming commands, translated into sense on the screen of her brain. She would be dragged into an Egyptian police station at gunpoint, and then used as a hostage for some impossible demand. They might as well prop her up in front of a firing squad. Our little helper, she heard again. She had become his slave. But what he said next shocked her.

  “The police use your computer program,” the man said, with a sick grimace on his face. “GEH-NEE-ZAH.”

  The name floated in the stale air like an unpleasant smell. The days since her capture had been the longest amount of time she had spent since childhood without looking at a screen. Now her own program was summoned before her like a lover, the cool glow of its smooth, dirtless, entirely logical screens a pure fantasy, empathetic magic. She thought of the interface she had created for it, not “files” like most applications, but instead an infinitely expanding number of doors: doors of varying sizes and shapes, wooden doors, steel doors, cabinet doors, cellar doors, French doors, painted doors, revolving doors, locked doors, doors that led to tunnels and hallways and staircases and spiral staircases that led to other doors, doors that would spring open on screen to reveal whatever a person had forgotten to remember. She opened a door in her mind and saw ­Itamar’s face when she had told him—in the dark hollow of the night when they first kissed, during a conversation that felt like burrowing into a deep underground cavern leading to the promised land—how embarrassed she always felt by her success. The shame seeped out from reasons buried deep within her: because of the resentment she felt from every person around her like subtle vibrations in the air, because of her sense that the resentment was deserved, because of her arrogance that she had never been able to shed. And also because of something more, a sense that shook the ground beneath her feet—that she was trying to cross the boundary of human limitations, that she was trying to stop time, that everything she had ever done in her life was exactly the opposite of walking humbly with one’s God. She had never admitted it to anyone before, how ashamed she was. But with Itamar that night, for the first time in her life, the air around her stood still. “You shouldn’t be, Yosefi,” he had said to her. And then, in Hebrew, the words she needed to hear: “You have given a gift to the world.”

  “Egyptian police, they are bastards,” the man said, his mouth still pinched in a grimace. “They were bastards before the revolution. Everyone thinks it is different now, but now it is only worse. Now it is army and police, but the same. I saw GEH-NEE-ZAH there, when they arrest me. Your computers are helping bastards.”

  Bastards, Josie thought—as distinguished from the people who held her captive and bludgeoned her with metal bats. If she weren’t in so much pain she might have laughed.

  “I only make the software,” she said, aware of how pathetic she sounded, of how pathetic she was. But his words gave her hope. If the Egyptian police were sophisticated enough to be running her systems, perhaps there was a chance that someone there could still find her? She shifted her hips, then winced, struggling not to moan. Her leg was hurting her again.

  “Bastards,” the man repeated, and then made a noise Josie didn’t recognize at first. A cough,
perhaps, or a hiccup. He made the noise again, a cry strangled by a gasp. Then he said, “They killed my son.”

  Josie held her breath. Was the man even old enough to have a son? She had imagined him to be younger than she was, irretrievably immature. Perhaps he was; perhaps he had had a child as a teenager. Or perhaps his child was young, Tali’s age. Would police kill a child Tali’s age? She looked again at his oiled hair, his bristling jaw, his thick hands around the bat. Had the bat belonged to his son?

  “They have records of everyone,” the man continued. “Everything. Pictures, messages, places. They remember everyone. All with your computer program. Before the revolution was bad, but now with the army it is the same, sometimes worse. If they want someone they cannot find, they take the family, kill the family. They follow everyone. They find my son by his cell phone. He is thirteen years old. Now they follow my daughter.”

  Josie looked down at the shackle around her leg, the thick iron ring that dug into her skin. You have given a gift to the world, Itamar said in her mind. A thousand arguments rose in her throat, flavored like bile. She would have no pity for this man, she decided. She allowed herself to sink into the waves of residual pain from her legs, from her ankles, from the soles of her bare feet, from her hard swollen cheek. Your problem, Josie, Judith said in her mind, is that you have no empathy. None. If only it were true.

  “Some machine codes can destroy computers,” the man said now, in a philosophic tone. “Like a plague.”

  She realized only after a pause that he had asked her a question.

  “You mean malware?”

  He cocked his head at her.

  “Like a virus?” she clarified, though technically viruses were only a subset of malware, and not even the relevant subset. She swallowed her corrections, silencing the pedant within her.

  The man smiled again. “Yes, the virus. You will make the virus, and destroy the police records,” he said, and slapped his hands together, a gesture that was less a clap than an imaginary door slammed shut. “Can you do this?”

  Never in her life had she attempted malware; never, in all her endless building, had she ever tried to destroy anything at all. The inconceivably vast mental effort of programming—the colossal, evolutionarily unlikely process of creating something from nothing, the almost obscene control over individual electrons, the act of telling nature how to move, the harnessing of a nearly divine power to direct outcomes, to determine fate—all to make something not work?

  But now she watched the man beginning to sneer as she hesitated, and recalled the only thing left in the world she could do: say yes.

  “Of course I can,” she announced.

  The man furrowed his brow, suspicious. “How?”

  Did he doubt her, or was he testing her? She had to make it sound obvious, she realized, easy. People who knew nothing about programming always assumed that for people like her, it was easy. She would embody the myth.

  “I could certainly damage machines that are using my own applications,” she said. “No one knows the product better than I do.” That hadn’t been true for ages, of course. It had been a very long time since she had done any direct coding for the product at all. But if it were an old enough version of her software, there was some small chance that she had herself designed it. A small chance, her only chance.

  “Very good,” the man said. He was testing her, she saw. Josephine Ashkenazi was good at taking tests.

  “There are always bugs to exploit,” she said. “Even the newest version has bugs. It’s just that we haven’t found them all yet.”

  “Bugs,” the man repeated.

  She ignored him, absorbing the risk. “The question is how old their version might be, and whether they bothered getting the patches for it. They’re probably running one of the older versions. We haven’t even marketed the newer ones overseas, outside of Europe and Israel.”

  “You sell computer programs in Israel?”

  She sucked in her breath, steeled herself. “Yes,” she said. And then, after a split-second calculation weighing dignity and risk, she added, “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Why wouldn’t we?” The “we” brought her comfort, more than she hoped. It was like holding Itamar’s hand.

  “You sell right away to Israel but not to Egypt? In Egypt we have millions more people. Millions more customers!”

  Pointing out the vast differences between the two countries seemed like a poor idea. Was he that dumb, or was he provoking her? It was impossible to tell. She thought of Nasreen, of how she never could understand what Nasreen said, how she was unable to tell the difference between what Nasreen said and what Nasreen meant. Was the woman who had hanged her Nasreen? “A lot of our software developers are Israeli,” she said. “If we didn’t sell it there, someone there would come up with something better before we did. They’re our competition.”

  “Egyptian police are using Israeli computers?”

  “My company is American.” As though that were better.

  “But programs are made by Israelis.”

  “And lots of other people.”

  “Egyptian police are using Israeli computers,” he repeated.

  “Practically every computer system in the world has Israeli components. Pentium chips were invented in Israel.” Don’t be insane, she begged herself. She tried to push back the data surging within her, tried channeling it to safety. “But the machine code is in binary, and the numerals are Arabic,” she offered lamely. “So Arabs invented the digits every computer is made of, if we’re going to start parsing where everything is from.” Restricting the flow of data was impossible, she saw; it surged, it overflowed. In minutes she would bleed again.

  “Machine code,” he said. This seemed to please him.

  Josie closed her eyes, briefly, to prevent herself from rolling them. But the relief of evading another beating brought unspeakable joy.

  “You will make the virus,” he commanded.

  “Yes,” she said. As if it were a choice.

  The man grinned, a wide, warm grin. “I will bring you a computer,” he said, beaming. “Do you need special kinds?” It was as if she were his daughter, deciding what she wanted for her birthday.

  She thought carefully, seizing her chance. “I would need a new or at least a recent machine, with a recent operating system,” she said. “Not a Mac, unless they use Macs. I’m sure they don’t use Macs.” She thought of the sparkling new machines in the Alexandria library, the glowing marble edifices of the library complex beyond the crowds of paupers in the streets of the city. Which was real, and which was the dream? “I’d also need whatever version of the product they’re using, so I could test it, and the developer tools from our internal website,” she added. “And network access.”

  “Network access?” he asked.

  “An internet connection,” she replied. She said this as casually as she could, as if it were a mere accessory, rather than a rope thrown into a pit to save her life.

  The man understood instantly. “No,” he growled. “No internet. No.”

  “I can’t transmit a virus without network access,” she lied.

  “Then you are not necessary,” he said. “We do not need you anymore.”

  He had called her bluff. To her surprise she was impressed, and humbled. How could she have expected to outlie a ­criminal—especially one who had spent enough time in police headquarters to know what software they used?

  “I could do it without network access if you download the developer tools for me, and if you give me a USB drive once it’s finished,” she said quickly. “You would have to send someone physically into the police headquarters to infect their machines with it, but it would work. Even better, because then I wouldn’t have to guess where the bugs are in their firewall.”

  “Better,” he repeated, and smiled. He took a small notepad out of his back pocket, along with a little stump of a pencil, and flipped through its pages. She looked at the Arabic script on the page
s as they fluttered by, and the obvious joke formed in her mind: “To do: 1. Kidnap software executive. 2. Pick up dry cleaning.” For an instant she fantasized about sharing the joke with Itamar, the two of them laughing about it over dinner, adding more items to the list: “3. Order Girl Scout cookies. 4. Record execution video. 5. Change shirt.”

  To her astonishment, as she sat chained to a concrete block in an ancient sealed room, her mind allowed her, in the instant of that mental joke, to actually be in her kitchen in Massachusetts with Itamar, just as vividly as she was sitting in her cell. She could hear his cartoonish laugh (the laugh that had embarrassed her, years ago, when they first met), feel his thin fingers on hers on the warm wooden table. She could even smell steamed broccoli, which she sometimes ate with dinner because she felt that she should, even though she didn’t like it. In her kitchen in that mental moment, the steamed broccoli smell gave her pause. She didn’t like broccoli, but she particularly loathed its smell. The smell suggested that her momentary escape wasn’t a fantasy at all. It was something else, though she could not yet understand what.

  “USB,” the man said. His voice snapped her back into the prison room. She watched him struggle with the letters as he recorded it on the little notepad.

  “I can write it all down for you,” she offered. She thought of Joy, Tali’s babysitter, of how every day in her house had once begun with her going over things with Joy, carefully inscribing grocery lists for Joy, delineating what brand of fish sticks Joy needed to prepare for Tali. A door slammed in her mind, eliminating a world. The man passed her the notepad, and held the bat above her head.

  “You write,” he said. “I bring. And then you will make the code.”

  AS A CHILD SHE had read a picture-book version of One Thousand and One Nights. She knew now what would happen: when the code was finished, they would kill her. The solution, of course, was never to finish. She would become a software Scheherazade.

  During the days—she knew now when it was daytime; the clock at the corner of the screen was an oracle (if the time it displayed was even correct)—she wrote code. Most mornings, one of the guards—for that was who Bear Stearns and Doctors Without Borders were, teenage guards who even seemed to be employed on a schedule (were they paid? or were they the man’s other sons?)—would bring in pita bread, an open can of unheated vegetables or beans, a plastic bottle of water, and a surprisingly decent laptop (had they stolen it from somewhere?), which he would plug into an extension cord that ran beneath the room’s thick wooden door. He would then put the machine on the pail-shaped block of poured concrete, awkwardly balanced beside the chain, and wait for its screen to illuminate. He would open the program, watching with her as the English words “Genizah” floated up from the center to the corner of the screen. Then he would leave. And Josie, after running a fruitless daily search for nearby Wi-Fi, would crouch over the machine and enter another world.