by Dara Horn
What sickened her most was that she was jealous of Musa. Or, more accurately, jealous of Musa’s parents, despite the horror they had endured and despite the horror they were now inflicting on her. For their child was the sort of child she had hoped to have, a child with an obviously discernible intellectual talent, a child who taught his parents things they had never known about the world. But it was a childish thing to hope for, she saw now, childish in every sense of the term—to hope one’s child would be a superior version of oneself. As Musa had known, the world was rigorously patterned, but the pattern would never repeat.
“You will put these photos inside the machine,” Musa’s father said.
He had come in that evening for the second time, after her hummus-and-pita dinner, and Josie braced herself for the physical nausea he still aroused in her, avoiding the humiliation of eye contact. But when she glanced up at him, feeling his eyes boring through her behind his sunglasses, she stared in surprise. In his right hand was an object that took her many long moments to identify, something that made the stinking air shudder with what the ancients once described as magic, holiness, access to the firmament, a route to communion with the divine. It was a phone.
The phone was a first-generation smartphone, a four-year-old knockoff that Josie, in her former life at the pinnacle of human creation, hadn’t seen in a very long time. But to see a phone of any kind in this tomb now was jolting, electrifying. She thought of the passages she had read the night before in Guide for the Perplexed, on the difference of opinion over what was possible. She had the odd sensation that an impossibility had just occurred—as if he had just drawn a square with a diagonal the same length as its sides, or as if Tali, with blood pulsing through her body and a smile on her lips, had just walked through the door. Josie did not even recognize the feeling it aroused in her: hope.
“Nice phone,” she murmured, to say something. The words were filthy in her mouth, thick with ash and dust. It occurred to her that there couldn’t possibly be any connectivity in this dungeon. Or could there be? She noticed that he was holding his bat. She felt her legs beginning to shake. It was a reflex now, whenever she saw him. She was his dog, his slave.
“My wife buy for me,” he told her with a grin. She wondered if it were true, then mentally kicked herself, reminded herself that surely it wasn’t. Nothing this man said was true. Maybe he had never even had a son. Or more likely, he had created the particular son he had been forcing Josie to record in the software, sculpting him out of distorted and false memories and then trying, ridiculously, to use Josie’s program to breathe him into life. Josie knew what he was doing; she had done it herself. The Tali she had created, in the program and in her mind, was just as false, like everything human beings create—a lifeless lump of clay, inspired by no more than vanity.
He sat down beside her with his shoulder against hers as he tapped the screen of his miraculous phone. It was the first time anyone had touched her since the hanging, months earlier. Josie blinked her eyes and imagined that it was Itamar resting against her, remembering the first time she had rubbed against his warm, beautiful body. They had been sitting next to each other at a lab in the computer science department at Bar Ilan University north of Tel Aviv, while they waited through a break in a conference where they both were speaking. They had both migrated to the lab to check their messages—a visit that would soon feel as outdated as stopping by a telegraph office, but not then, not yet. She had asked him where he was from, and he had shown her on screen with a program that was still in beta testing, giving her a satellite view of the limestone apartment bloc in the crowded neighborhood where he had grown up. She felt it now in this dungeon, as though she were there in that air-conditioned lab from years ago: the tingle of his surprisingly soft shoulder against her sleeve as she slid her chair next to his, the jolting and unexpected thrill of feeling his arm pressed against hers as he took her into outer space to show her his past. She hadn’t known, until that moment, that she liked him. It had left her shaken, bereft of her steadying arrogance, stumbling for words.
“You were expecting a palace?” he had asked. He had felt the shift of her sleeve against his, and had thought it was because of the squalor on the screen. “My father came from the melah in Marrakesh. For him this is a palace.”
Salt, the word meant. She was confused, but pretended not to be. Suddenly, for reasons she could not completely explain, it had become important to understand this man, or to make him think she understood him. Later she looked it up: it referred to the Jewish ghettos in North African cities. They had apparently persisted, for the poor at least, until the 1950s, when boycotts and pogroms left Arab Jews with few choices but to flee. She hadn’t known. “No, it’s—” She had stuttered, searching, suddenly forgetting her most basic Hebrew, falling back on English. “It’s just that it isn’t very different from where I grew up.” She tapped the keyboard and showed him the apartment building where she and her mother and sister had moved after her father left, where her mother still lived.
“Right by the train tracks,” he noticed.
She laughed. “I never needed an alarm clock,” she said, then hesitated. But the warm shudder of his arm against hers made her speak. “My mother still lives there. She won’t let me move her.”
Unlike everyone she knew, he didn’t ask her why, didn’t force her to lie to avoid saying what she knew to be true: that her mother was punishing herself, living the life she felt she had earned with her mistakes, the life she felt she deserved. Instead, he nodded.
“Some people only want what they make for themselves,” Itamar said. “If they didn’t create it, they think it isn’t theirs.” She breathed, haunted. It was precisely true. His words lingered in her mind like a sweet, aching smell.
Her captor’s voice jarred her back into the present. “Look, here is Musa with his puzzles,” he said.
She kept her eyes closed for another instant, living in the fantasy, feeling the man’s sleeve against hers. Then she admitted defeat, and returned to the darkness of the room’s electric light.
“See this one he built? It is with playing cards, but cut up, so when he moves them the numbers are changed. I cannot explain.”
Josie looked. The boy in the picture was skinny, with a slightly crooked nose—not nearly as handsome as his father had described him. But there was something about him that startled her, a familiar quality in the engrossed delight on his face as he flourished a thin hand in an awkward showman’s gesture, displaying what even Josie had to admit was an impressive origami-like house of cards. It had been so long since she had seen a child, since she had seen someone who wasn’t evil, since she had seen someone who was happy. She swallowed, refusing to cry.
The man was smiling under his mirrored sunglasses, a new kind of smile that she hadn’t seen before. “Can you put the pictures on the computer?” His tone was innocent, vulnerable.
“Sure,” she said brightly, as though Itamar had just asked her to pass the salt. She heard her own cheerful tone and felt like spitting on herself. Don’t forget, she reminded herself. But why not forget? Why not help this man, give him comfort? There was so little she could do, good or bad, from inside this tomb; why not use the one power she had to give another person some happiness, to give him the gift of these precious moments with his dead son? This was madness, of course, madness disguised as kindness. But she could no longer distinguish between the two. Wouldn’t she want someone to do the same for her—indeed, wouldn’t she submit to any torture just to see a photograph of Tali again? Wasn’t she aching, dying, to send a single message with the oracle of that phone?
“I have the USB cable, but I cannot do it,” he said, taking a wire from his pocket and connecting the phone to the laptop. “You take.” And then he handed her the phone.
I wonder if this gate is open, Josie thought, in the words she had read the night before, or closed and guarded by certain rules, so that one could decide with certainty whether a thing is physically impossi
ble. For it was physically impossible that she was now holding her captor’s phone in her hand. Were the rules suspended? Was the impossible suddenly possible?
The man saw her pause, saw her staring at the phone. If he recognized that the laws of the universe had been altered at that moment, he gave no notice. He pointed at the laptop’s screen. “Put the pictures in,” he said.
His tone was still gentle, urging only slightly, as though he had made a polite request. He seemed not to remember the bat he had placed on the floor. Josie opened the program, clicked a few times, followed some prompts on the phone’s screen. She was alarmed by how familiar it all felt, her hands moving quickly, automatically, like swimming after stepping down into a deep cold pool. For a long time he watched over her shoulder as she began uploading the photos, peering at the screen with a hard, tight smile across his jaw. But as the photos became redundant—the man, it seemed, was the type who liked to snap pictures of anything, multiple shots of the same occasion from different angles, unedited—the computer began to slow down, taking its time.
“Can you make it faster?” he asked her.
“Sorry, you have a lot of pictures in here,” she said, shaken again by her own casualness, by how normal it felt to be treated as though she were the tech support guy from down the hall. “This software is a few years old, and images are a lot of data. It’s going to take awhile.”
She was surprised that he didn’t seem to show any interest in learning how to do it himself. It was repetitive, relatively simple; she could have taught him what to do in minutes, but apparently he had grown accustomed to having a slave. He stood up, still hovering for a time, as though hoping to see the next picture of his son appear on the screen again. Then he turned away, looked at his watch, and wandered over to the opposite corner of her cell, taking a small booklet and pencil out from his back pocket. She watched him from the corner of her eye as she waited for an image to load. He opened the booklet, stared at it, and drew his dark eyebrows together over his sunglasses before scribbling something in it with his pencil. Then he sank down to the floor, seating himself against the wall and engrossing himself in the little book. As he adjusted his position, she saw the booklet’s cover: Sudoku. He wasn’t so different from his son, she realized. In another life, on another planet, she and he might have become friends.
Blood thrummed in her weakened body. In an instant she understood what was suddenly, shockingly, possible.
She glanced at the man again, now fully absorbed in his book of number puzzles, and ran what she was about to do through her head as though it were a program, checking for bugs. If he were simply to sit up, if he were to give the slightest glance at the phone in her hands, he would kill her. It wasn’t a question. The only question was whether he would strangle her immediately or torture her first. But if I do nothing, he will still kill me, she reminded herself. She thought of the hanging, of the rope around her shoulders, of the dark plastic bag over her head, of the tight choking jerk of the harness around her neck. It would happen again, she knew, no matter what. I am already dead. I am already dead.
With stumbling fingers, she shifted the phone out of its photo mode and hurriedly typed in Itamar’s cell phone number, astonished and invigorated that she remembered it. For a fleeting second it was as though she were at home, or at the office, sending him a quick text or replying to his, reminding each other to tell the sitter to pick up Tali at three instead of four because Girl Scouts was rescheduled (again), to make Tali an appointment for a flu shot, to sign up for Tali’s parent–teacher conference and would 8 am on the 24th work for you? Josie had spent years resenting those moments, all the minuscule mindless tasks that take up every available second of every day of raising a child. But now, as she held her captor’s phone in her hand in her private dungeon, the thought of doing even a single one of them was miraculous, saturated with gleaming, blinding beauty. Itamar’s number glowed in the light in her hand.
Weeks of programming for fourteen hours a day had regrooved her brain, plowed and sowed it with the habit of anticipating incompatibilities. For fear that the message wouldn’t go through, she added Judith’s number. Then, in absolute terror, in letters that stuttered like the child she had become in the past months, she wrote the first and only thing she could think of:
im still here dont tell anyone come get me love josie
She hit send, and then approved, shaking in terror, when the phone told her that it could only send the message when a signal was available. This, of course, was the most horrifying part—that the message would be sent only when the man emerged from the dungeon, and wouldn’t he surely see it then? Wouldn’t it most likely register only as a failure, without ever being sent at all? Even if it did go through, wouldn’t an international text consume whatever money he had in his account, or wind up prominently on his bill? Wouldn’t it linger in his phone, sitting in his sent mail, blindingly obvious in its English words, conspicuous in every possible way, signed with her own name? It would, it would. But it didn’t matter, she reminded herself. I am already dead. She had become like her demented mother, alone in a room, inaccessible to the living, drowned in the past, drowned by the past. I am already dead. And suddenly, as she toggled back to the photos of the dead boy, she was already free.
The man looked up. “Is it finished?” he asked.
“Sorry, I—it was going slow,” she stammered, still shaking. “Almost done. I’m up to these ones of him with this girl.” She tilted the screen toward him, angling it so that he could see what she had seen: a picture of the skinny boy with an equally skinny girl, a short girl with pigtails and dark bangs, a girl who couldn’t have been more than six years old. The girl, Josie now noticed with unease, was wearing fairy wings.
He sat down beside her again, looked at the screen. “Yes, his sister. They were best friends.” He cleared his throat, adjusted his sunglasses. “I did not know that a girl could be like him. She is starting too, with the puzzles,” he said, with a small grin. “But she is only a girl.”
Josie wondered what he meant by “only”—that she was young, or that she was female? She thought of asking him, before remembering where she was, who she was, why she was. She remained silent, burning with what she had done. The pictures loaded slowly into the program, and when it was finished Josie showed him how the facial recognition tool would sort them, how it would adjust which doors it put his son behind based on the setting of the photograph, which other people were in it, the expression on his son’s face. Eventually the man nodded, smiled. For what seemed like an endless amount of time, he sat at the computer beside her, traveling through the software’s many rooms, opening doors. Sometimes he let out gasps of happy surprise, other times he bit his lip, suppressing a smile. Josie watched him as he moved through the palace she had built for his son. He laughed, shuddered, sometimes even spoke—happy Arabic exclamations with his finger pointed at the screen, directed at the person she had buried within the code. By the time he reached the last unexplored door, he was grinning so hard that he had to tilt his head toward the ceiling, exhilarated. She could see that he didn’t want to stand up, didn’t want to leave. He was alive in the house of the dead.
“I have also movies of him,” he said, when he finally turned to Josie. Joy still lingered at the corners of his mouth. “In a camera at my brother’s house. Can you put movies in?”
“If they’re in a digital format,” Josie said. She looked down at the shackle around her filthy leg. The guards only brought her a bucket of water and a rag to bathe with every few days, if that, and only rarely threw her a bar of soap. Her bare feet were encrusted in dirt. Did Itamar and Tali do this, she suddenly wondered—were they at home now plowing through the software, laughing at her jokes from years ago, pretending that she was still alive? She was surprised by how much the thought unnerved her, by how hard she hoped that they never did. “You’d have to put them on a flash drive.”
The man clapped his hands, like a child at a birthday party�
��or, more accurately, like Musa at his own birthday party, the photos of which she had just loaded into the machine. “I will make it on drives,” he said.
She thought he would leave her alone then, with the computer. Usually she was expected to continue coding until long after what passed for dinner—several exhausting hours during which one of the guards would periodically check that she was working on the code, before removing the computer for the night. The malware was nearly done, as the man knew well from the demonstrations she had made for him every few days, often with a truncheon pressed into her back. Twice he had even brought a gun, which he had held against her jaw, laughing, as she typed. He enjoyed watching her tremble. But the man didn’t seem to care about the malware now. Astonishingly, he didn’t even ask to see it. Instead he shut down the laptop, picked it up, and began to leave the room. He jumped the few steps to the bolted door, almost dancing.
“You will do more tomorrow,” he told her as he opened the door, with the bat wedged under his giddily shaking arm. Before he left, he turned back toward her. And then he said, “Thank you.”
THAT NIGHT JOSIE HAD an argument with the dead author of Guide for the Perplexed. Her objection concerned the omniscience of God.
She had followed him through his argument on the nature of evil—an argument which made more sense to her, even in the depths of her dungeon, than any other idea she had ever heard. Men frequently think that the evils in the world are more numerous than the good things, he had written, that a good thing is found only exceptionally, while evil things are numerous and lasting. Not only common people make this mistake, but even many who think they are wise. The words gave her strength. She thought of the many miracles outside—air, light, leaves, water, every healthy person she had ever known—and of those that swirled around her even now: the astounding, nearly impossible fact that she hadn’t been raped, that she had barely been beaten, that she was weirdly and horribly and undeniably alive. Despite all the visits from the man and his guards, she hadn’t even been groped—which in Egypt was beyond miraculous. She looked at her fingers as they held the book and was overwhelmed by the network of veins that she could see through her translucent skin, the delicacy of muscle and bone. She imagined holding Tali in the delivery room, the tight grip of her newborn girl’s fingers around her own—the power in those fingers, how they clutched her thumb as if speaking, saying: Mommy, never leave.