Those who believe in God and who on the Last
Day do good deeds, all of these need not
Fear, for they will not be afflicted.
Perhaps you can ask the imams to tell you, according to them, what these lines mean.
III
I have a new friend. He’s the descendant of a prince from a time when Morocco did not yet exist and was populated by lions and savage tribes—or at least that’s what he says. This prince was a mathematician and an astronomer and studied the sun and the stars, the moons and the planets. He was the first to divide the year into 365 days of 24 hours each (plus 5 hours, 46 minutes, and 24 seconds).
I’d tell you of another science we have to study to become pilots—and, if Allah so wishes, astronauts. It is the science that studies shadows—there are both dark and white shadows—as well as triangles, pyramids, and spheres. But I don’t want to bore you!
Xeno is, first and foremost, a great friend. He tells me that when we get a vacation, he’d like to make a stop in Tangier—on the way to Athens, where he was born—to meet you and Ba. He asked me to teach him Arabic, and in a matter of days, he learned the numbers and the alphabet. Now we write each other in English using Arabic letters—a new kind of Aljamía—so that no one else can understand our messages. And for his part, he’s teaching me Greek.
IV
Dear all,
I’m writing you today from a place far south of Massachusetts, called Merritt Island, in Florida. It’s hot and very humid here, it can rain at any moment, and the air is full of insects. Hamdul-lah!
As I told Yimma a few days ago on Skype, I’ve been chosen, with about twenty other students, selected from thousands, to enter a special program at NASA. In a few months, once I have my American citizenship, we’ll become real astronauts. (They might give me honorary citizenship for being an “alien of extraordinary ability.” That’s what they gave Albert Einstein and other “aliens”!)
Do you remember, Yimma, how Ba used to say that the story of man on the moon was a lie, mere propaganda by the Americans, who want to seem as powerful as God himself, so as to be admired above all humanity? Well, people who make such arguments are mistaken. Allah made us intelligent and bold and capable of great works because it pleases him to see his creatures understanding and conquering not only the ball of the world but the whole universe!
V
Today is a bad day, Driss.
I told you all that they were going to grant me US citizenship. Today I got a letter saying the request has been denied. Why? I’m too Muslim!
I’m not coming home yet. I will keep you informed.
I miss you.
PART TWO
Xenophon
Xenophon has notable defects: He is not thorough in his gathering of data. He is forgetful and marginalizes facts of primary importance. And he narrates events from his own perspective.
—Greekipedia (June 26, 2016, 11:00 a.m.)
I
Xeno jumped out of the old fishing boat onto the concrete pier on the island of Leros—the island of windmills and barren hills, the island of the asylum—where the rough sea mixed with the sky. As waves rocked the boat, he lifted out his father’s heavy leather suitcase, in which they’d packed the medications purchased in the only two pharmacies on the neighboring island of Patmos. The captain shouted over the whooshing of the wind and the crashing of the waves, “At seven! Stis epta! Epta! ” and with a turn of the rudder, the boat moved away from the dock.
A black male nurse (Red Cross and Red Crescent) waited on the dock. He invited Dr. Galanis and his son to climb into a little English jeep. Xeno took the back seat, leaning forward to hear his father’s conversation with the nurse.
“How many?” asked Dr. Galanis.
“Thirty-four,” the nurse said. “Yesterday there were almost a hundred. Meningitis. They’re going crazy all at once.”
“What kind of meningitis?”
The nurse shrugged his shoulders. “Epidemic,” he said.
“They can’t just keep coming like this.”
“They’re not coming because they want to,” Xeno said.
“Something has to be done so that they won’t want to come,” replied the nurse.
“They’re biological bombs,” said his father, looking to his right at a number of orange spots vibrating in the distance. The nearest ones suddenly became a line of points of the same color and were then transformed into several dozen passengers in life jackets. “That’s what they are.”
These days there were fewer deranged patients in the hospital, the nurse explained. They’d all, with the exception of the terminal patients, been evacuated after the “scandals.” He was referring to certain articles in the European press that had appeared some decades earlier, denouncing the deplorable state of the mental hospital on Leros, which the newspapers called “the island of the mad.” Now the sick immigrants were being taken to ward 16—a kind of large, covered pool with a ceramic floor and very high walls.
“Do you know the hospital?” the nurse asked.
The doctor ignored the question. “Are they exposed to the sun?”
“There’s a shady area. It’s not an attractive place,” the nurse added. “In the middle of the floor, the shit gets mixed in with the leftovers. There is hardly any bedding. And not a single mattress. We have one plate for every five or six people, and one glass for every ten. At least there are fewer things to wash.”
“How many doctors?”
“Today, just you. And there are no antibiotics, no painkillers, not even aspirin. Frankly, there’s not much to do.”
The old Italian prison, converted first into a mental hospital and now into a refugee asylum, stood in the middle of a valley full of willows. At the tall metal gate, a guard let them in almost without a glance.
“Masks?”
The nurse shrugged. He had one, he said, pulling a mask out of the pocket of his smock.
They crossed over the main patio under tall Italian arches. A number of elderly terminal patients were stretched out on the floor in the hopes of catching a few weak rays of sun. Dr. Galanis stopped at the entrance of ward 16. He took out a mask from his suitcase, handed it to Xeno, and, using a gauze bandage and a handkerchief, fashioned another for himself.
“Saliva is very dangerous,” he said to Xeno. “Cover up your mouth and nose. And don’t take it off till we’ve left.”
“Of course.”
They put on their masks.
In ward 16, they found refugees of all ages. Stretched out against the entire length of the walls, they kept very near to each other to stay warm. The smell of their bodies and their waste was like a subtle, greasy gas that penetrated the visitors’ nostrils, in spite of the masks. Xeno at one point had to stop himself from vomiting.
The doctor turned on a small flashlight. “The light is very irritating if you have meningitis,” he said.
“Of course, Father.”
In a corner under a high window with clouded panes, mothers and their babies sat together on the ground. The doctor put on rubber gloves and knelt beside a woman holding a two- or three-year-old girl in her arms. He opened the suitcase and took out a stethoscope. He frowned as he listened to the child’s heartbeat and again as he felt her neck, armpits, and abdomen. The girl seemed not to notice anything. The doctor had her lie on her side on the floor, then drew up her knees in a fetal position, with her chin touching her thorax. He took a roll of sterile cotton out of the case, tore off a piece, and soaked it in alcohol to clean her back. He let the little ball of blackened cotton fall, and the nurse gave it a kick toward the middle of the floor. The doctor turned to Xeno and asked for a syringe. He had to take a sample of spinal fluid—a lumbar tap. They would make a culture. But first he needed to anesthetize her, he said.
In the beam of the flashlight, he saw that the girl’s mother had both arms covered with reddish-black stains; they looked like hematomas caused by a beating.
He would have to amputate
the infected limbs as soon as possible, the doctor said.
“We have saws. There’s plenty of alcohol,” said the nurse, “and sponges. But that’s about it.”
In addition to English, the nurse spoke Turkish and Syrian Arabic; he asked the children to sit up and remain seated with their backs against the walls. Dr. Galanis began to distribute medications, but they soon ran out. It was an act more merciful than therapeutic. Xeno helped to place pieces of cardboard under the jaws of the seated children, asking them to hold the cardboard there, applying pressure on the thorax. Those unable to do so were separated and led to one of the communal baths, where they would remain isolated from the rest.
The doctor took a little tube of alcohol gel out of his pocket. He disinfected his hands and had Xeno do the same.
II
It was in the library of the Byzantine monastery of Saint John the Theologian, on the island of Patmos, that one of the monks realized Xenophon Galanis had a prodigious mind. At seven years old, he could already read manuscripts in eleventh-century Greek. That summer, he began spending the first hours of each morning in monastic calm, examining volume after volume, while other children his age played on the beaches or sailed in their parents’ boats and yachts. In the afternoon, when a cruise ship arrived at the small port of Scala, the happy, big-eyed, chubby-cheeked child offered his services as guide to those who came up to Khora to visit the holy cave. It was in this cave, around AD 95, that Saint John dictated his hallucinatory end-of-the-world vision. The cave lay not far from Xeno’s parents’ house, and the monks who ran it were his friends.
“I think the child wants to join our congregation,” said the abbot one day to Xeno’s mother, an art collector of English descent.
“You’re mistaken, Father,” she said with a mix of pride and humor. “He wants to be a saint!”
“That’s what I meant” was the abbot’s presumptuous response. He was a Greek from the nearby island of Kos—bearded, well-mannered, and corpulent.
At the age of nine, however, during a family dinner in the house in Khora, Xeno declared he was thinking of studying art history. His older sister, whom he worshipped, had done the same and was now a curator of Byzantine art at an important London museum.
His father objected.
“It’s a wonderful occupation, my dear Xeno, and you must forgive my saying this, but there are more suitable things for a boy like you. You will understand later on.”
Xeno did not contradict him. His mother and sister refrained from commenting. They were dining on the terrace of the little garden, which looked out over the southern part of the island. A small and very white solitary cloud rose in the light-purple sky of the east, opposite the sun, sinking in the Aegean.
“It seems they used to have an alarm system that was controlled by the monks,” the boy said. “It connected the monasteries, which were also forts, to alert the communities to approaching enemies—Venetian or Barbary pirates or whoever. That’s how they were able to prevent surprise attacks. The network reached from Constantinople to Jerusalem and Rome, including several islands of the Dodecanese, like Patmos and Leros. There were monasteries every fifty or seventy kilometers. And the oven in the monastery wasn’t just used for baking bread.” Xeno turned his gaze to the hilltop, toward the monastery, which rose above the island and, along with the Cave of the Apocalypse, stood as its powerful emblem.
“Also for scorching infidels?” his sister joked.
“For boiling olive oil to pour down the sluices,” corrected their mother.
“Amounts to the same thing,” their father said.
“They may have used it to make smoke signals,” Xeno continued. “In one of the books at the library—copied by an eleventh-century scribe who was the eunuch of an Abbasid conqueror and later became a monk—you can see the first report of the Romans’ defeat at Manzikert. No one had foreseen it. It was the monks who spread the news. In our monastery there are two chimneys in the rooms where they knead the dough. Between the chimneys a crucible is built into the base of the oven. The abbot thinks they used it to make pigment from zinc.”
“That’s all recorded in the book?” his sister asked.
“There’s residue in the rock. They would have been able to make white smoke,” Xeno said. “One of the monks would have kept watch, scanning a specific part of the horizon at a specific time. They probably used a kind of Morse code. Someone had to watch. Someone had to be there.”
His sister laughed and then said, “Bravo! It seems obvious. When Constantinople fell, they say people in Rome knew immediately. Three hours—with the time difference? It must have been a very clear day in this part of the world! Do you know what they’re still saying today in Rome?”
“The Catholics?” said their father with contempt.
“That the pope got the news in a vision,” she continued. “A mystical vision. More likely he got it by optical telegraph—that’s great, Xeno!”
“I don’t doubt it,” their father said, fondly stroking the head of his prodigy. “We’ll have to keep it in mind for the day when there’s no more internet.”
By the age of twelve, Xeno’s interests shifted to mathematics. He had stood out from an early age at Byron College in Athens. Then he was accepted at the Cambridge Faculty of Mathematics. He read with Griffiths (“No Consecutive Heads”) and George (“Testing for the Independence of Three Events”). A year later he was admitted to the East Anglian Rocketry Society. “Thank God for our English grandfather,” his sister commented when Xeno shared the news. Later, he traveled to Boston, where he entered MIT, taking courses in aerodynamics, astronomy, and astronautics.
III
It was during a round of talks on the future colonization of the Lagrangian points, at Singularity University in Silicon Valley, that Xeno met Abdelkrim. Even though the backgrounds of these two unusual minds could not have differed more, they agreed in many of their responses to the problems of manned space voyages. On the basis of these theoretical affinities, the two young men formed a close friendship. They had both been hired to work at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and thus they were able to spend time together and develop ideas over months of constant discussions. What good would all the knowledge that mankind might accumulate by natural or digital means do—they sometimes asked themselves, already in full mystical mode—if it didn’t reduce human suffering at least slightly? And was the prolonging of human life justified in ethical terms when it seemed clear that mankind had entered a period of terminal disintegration and destruction? (The attacks on Brussels and Paris were not far off.) Could they not imagine for the human species a situation in which death by fire would be a welcome liberation from the inferno of life? Wasn’t it possible, in fact, to make a case for universal euthanasia? Or were we condemned, out of loyalty, to hope for the continuation of the species, no matter the suffering? Thinking of something he’d read the night before by Paul Bowles, Xeno asked, “Wouldn’t it be better to go back technologically to where humanity found itself in the Middle Ages—to begin again from there and take a less violent path?”
“I’d say much further back,” the Moroccan replied. “Back to the Stone Age.”
One afternoon, riding in Xeno’s compact Range Rover on the way to Tassajara, they’d gotten farther than usual off the winding desert tracks and became disoriented. They had smoked some of the local cannabis (Purple Helmet) and from time to time broke into bouts of hysterics for no reason. A few days earlier, Xeno had suggested to Abdelkrim that he read The Aeneid, and now the Moroccan quoted the scene in which Aeneas gathered a group of young men for a test of prowess; a young warrior shot an arrow upward with such strength that, as it rose, it burst into flames and disappeared into space.
“You know the problem I found in that book?” he asked.
Xeno shook his head.
“Remember the ending, where Turnus, leader of an Italian tribe and mortal enemy of the Trojans, is defeated in battle and asks for Aeneas’s forgiv
eness? ‘Swallow now your hatred,’ he says. Do you remember what Aeneas does?”
“He answers?”
“Yes. And then he plunges his sword into Turnus’s chest.”
“Well, he deserved it.”
“Forgiving him would have shown unprecedented generosity.”
“That’s true,” said Xeno. “I wonder if Virgil ever thought of that.”
Coming around a sharp switchback in the road carved into the side of the mountain and talking about the possibility of launching their own spaceship, independent of the great powers—the dream of every astronaut who aspires to be more than a chauffeur of a super-luxury vehicle, as Xeno would say—they saw on the high slope in front of them, small and distant, the figure of a man moving over the rocks.
“But keep the budget in mind,” Abdelkrim had said.
Xeno, as if he hadn’t heard him, said, “Cooling the heat from the friction is the real problem. But it can also be the solution. Heat is energy, and this would be just the amount required by the thruster.”
The little man crouched down. Was he cutting a plant? Or digging? Xeno put the jeep in neutral and stopped at the high end of a gulley.
“He’s cutting something. But who is he?”
Abdelkrim took out a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment.
It was a classmate. He recognized him. His name was Matías Pacal, and he specialized in the observation of quasars and pulsars. Abdelkrim passed the binoculars to Xeno.
At that moment, Pacal went from being bathed in the light of the setting sun to being almost swallowed in shadow as the vast curve of night advanced from the horizon. They watched him shift and look toward the southeast before he lay back down on the ground.
Xeno put the binoculars back in the glove compartment.
Abdelkrim’s iPod was playing music: the Moroccan rhaita and the darbouka, the small ceramic drums covered with calf membrane played by djebala women. The red sky had darkened, and with every second another ten stars rose beyond the mountains to the east.
Chaos, A Fable Page 4