Alif the Unseen

by G. Willow Wilson

  Alif was taken aback by this bitter outpouring. He glanced at Vikram and was surprised to see genuine concern on his face. Stooping low in a doglike fashion, Vikram cantered ahead until he had caught up with the convert, and took her arm.

  “Enough,” he said softly. “Forgive me.”

  The convert looked away, staring at a dead Taif rosebush that clung to a wall, mummified in dust.

  “I don’t understand why you keep showing up,” she said. “I can’t be the only person you know worth harassing. I’m not pretty, I’m not charming, I’m not available, and I’ve made a strenuous effort not to be interesting to you. I don’t know why you come back again and again.”

  Vikram plucked at her sleeve, drawing her toward him.

  “You’re the only person I’ve ever met stupid enough not to fear me,” he said, “and yet you aren’t stupid. It drives me mad. Does that please you?”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I never lie.”

  The convert did not respond. Vikram murmured something too low for Alif to hear. It seemed to have the desired effect, for she looked up and him and smiled a little sheepishly.

  “Come along, younger brother,” said Vikram with a wave of his arm. “Keep up.”

  Alif jogged to meet them. The convert seemed mollified, and had slowed her steps again.

  “What I don’t get,” she said in a more conciliatory tone, “is how non-westerners can move back and forth between civilizations so easily. I think westerners never get the hang of it. It’s not in our cultural DNA to be adaptive. I mean, look at all the eastern writers who’ve written great western literature. Kazuo Ishiguro. You’d never guess that The Remains of the Day or Never Let Me Go were written by a Japanese guy. But I can’t think of anyone who’s ever done the reverse—any westerner who’s written great eastern literature. Well, maybe if we count Lawrence Durrell—does the Alexandria Quartet qualify as eastern literature?”

  “There is a very simple test,” said Vikram. “Is it about bored, tired people having sex?”

  “Yes,” said the convert, surprised.

  “Then it’s western.”

  The convert looked crestfallen, then laughed.

  “God, I’m afraid you’re right. Whatever. I’m being silly.”

  “Not at all.” Vikram made a gallant half-bow in her direction. Alif glanced from one to the other, feeling somewhat left out. He had known only a handful of westerners in his life, most of them instructors from Britain or America who taught at the shoddy private schools he had attended. His classmates had been other desis from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, along with a smattering of Malays and the odd Arab from less oil-rich North African lands; the children of migrant laborers with enough saved up to educate their children in a fashionable way. He had always assumed his Anglo teachers belonged to some other more ethereal way of being, free from the anxieties of identity and displacement he suffered. To see the convert distressed by such things unnerved him. He studied her out of the corner of his eye. A smile played around her mouth and disappeared; one eyebrow quirked upward and settled. Evidently she did have a sense of humor.

  “Ah. Let’s see now.” Vikram paused in front of a garden wall surrounding a villa. It was limestone, the sort quarried in the desert a century earlier by wealthy merchants who bought and built on the last parcels of land left in the Old Quarter.

  “What are we looking at? Why have we stopped?” asked Alif.

  Vikram lifted his nose and sniffed.

  “I smell vagrant air,” he said, “And water in pools of quartz. And possibly garlic. I think we’re in the right place.”

  “Sorry, what?” said the convert.

  “This smells right,” said Vikram patiently. “There must be an entrance to the Immovable Alley near where we’re standing.”

  Alif sighed in irritation. “You mean you’ve been leading us around by smell? Are you kidding me?”

  “What did I tell you,” said the convert, contempt settling on her face again, “He’s tricked us. Now he’ll ask for money.”

  Making a growling noise deep in his throat, Vikram stalked back and forth in front of the wall.

  “I’m beginning to lose my temper,” he said. “I offer to bring you to a place few of your kind are ever allowed to travel, to meet people in front of whom I pray you will not embarrass me, and you stand here bickering.”

  “Vikram, this is a wall!” Alif felt the last of his patience give out. “There’s no entrance to anything here. A wall is meant to keep people out.”

  “By God, why should that matter?” With a haughty glance, Vikram walked toward the limestone edifice, turned right, and disappeared, as if the wall was not a single structure at all, but two overlapping panes of stone with a narrow passage between them.

  Alif and the convert stood staring at the spot where he had vanished. The convert’s mouth was hanging open in a way Alif found unattractive, but mirrored the slack sensation in his skull: he struggled to make sense of what he had seen, and found he could not.

  “Are you coming or not?”Vikram’s voice came from an indeterminate point within the wall. The convert shook herself.

  “Yes,” she called faintly. Alif forced himself to string an intelligent answer together.

  “It must be some sort of optical illusion,” he suggested in a chastened voice. “Vikram has good depth perception.”

  “Yes,” repeated the convert. She took a step forward, then another. Arriving at the wall, she turned right, looked surprised, and vanished between the blocks of stone the same way Vikram had. Alone, Alif was suddenly nervous, and trotted in her wake, blinking once when he saw that there was in fact a slender opening. The wall was actually two walls, close together, so perfectly aligned that head-on one blended seamlessly into the next.

  The passageway between them seemed to extend much further than its outer appearance suggested. Alif followed it for what seemed like a full city block, then another; when it continued even further he began to panic.

  “Vikram?” His voice was shrill.

  “Down here, you idiot.”

  Alif peered at the stone-flagged ground and stopped himself just before tumbling down a set of stairs as invisible as the passageway had been. The only reason he could tell they were stairs at all, and not a continuation of even ground, was because Vikram and the convert were standing at the bottom, looking unusually small. Collecting himself, Alif walked down the steps to meet them. He attempted to appear nonchalant.

  “Hi,” he said. “Hello. I thought I’d lost you.”

  Vikram laughed. “You see? It’s as I said. Don’t you regret giving me so much grief ?” Moving aside, he revealed the strangest tangle of architecture Alif had ever seen: it was an alley, certainly, but it did not behave like one. The central corridor, lined by two walls and overhung with canopies of bright cloth, ran away from them into the distance. Stone staircases led from street level halfway up the walls, then stopped or turned in odd directions; staring at them for too long made Alif ’s head hurt. Doorways perched ten feet above the ground or stretched out at perpendicular angles into the main thoroughfare, such that you could see either side at once.

  The alley was crowded with people: circles of men perched on cushions in the dust, arguing with one another over rings of nargila smoke; women wearing veils or robes or very little at all hawking goods from the stalls that hugged either wall. Then there were those who resembled neither man nor woman, but errant shadows moving against the light, coalescing every so often into bipedal forms. The noise of it all, a blend of languages Alif could not entirely follow, rose and fell like a tide on a seashore. The effect was hypnotic.

  Vikram led them through the crowd toward a shop built into the left wall several hundred feet away. A woman with dark brown hair bound up in an elaborate network of braids stood within it, leaning against a wooden counter fronting the street. Her eyes, like Vikram’s, were yellowish; her features lacked any discernible ethnic trait or distinction. She smiled at Vik
ram as he approached, with the easy familiarity of long acquaintance.

  “As salaamu alaykum,” he said to her, touching his forehead.

  “W’alaykum salaam,” she replied. Her voice was low and liquid. She examined Alif in a way that made him blush, letting her eyes roam briskly up and down his figure with a look of concentration.

  “Why have you brought them here?” she asked Vikram in Arabic. “the Alley isn’t as safe as it used to be, you know. And I don’t think the girl is taking it very well.”

  Alif glanced at the convert: her eyes were glassy, and she kept swaying back and forth, as though falling asleep and catching herself each time she dozed off.

  “She’s an American,” said Vikram, apparently by way of explanation.

  “Ah.”The woman gave the convert a look of pity. “Half in, half out. She may not remember much of what passes here.”

  “She’ll remember enough. The boy is the chief reason we’ve come anyway, doubter though he is. Alif, this is Sakina. Sakina, this one calls himself Alif.”

  “Alif.” Sakina narrowed her sun-colored eyes. “A single stroke of the pen from top to bottom. The original letter. An interesting name.”

  “Thanks,” said Alif, feeling unnecessary.

  “Why have you come?” Sakina looked at him, raising one expectant eyebrow. Alif glanced at Vikram. Vikram was watching him and smiling a little.

  “I—well. I’ve got a book and I’d like to know where it comes from,” said Alif, when it became clear Vikram would deliver no explanation himself.

  “Oh? Let’s see it.”

  Alif slung his backpack on the ground and unzipped it, lifting out the Alf Yeom. He set it on the wooden counter in front of Sakina. Her eyes widened. She looked up at Vikram in dismay.

  “Vikram, Vikram—you’ve always been a trouble maker, but with this you have outdone yourself.”

  Vikram shrugged. “I’m getting old,” he said. “I let the wandering earth guide me where it may. If it brings me to grief, what does it matter?”

  Sakina clucked her tongue and glanced up and down the alley. “You three had better come inside,” she said, swinging the counter outward to admit them. Alif filed inside behind Vikram, leading the convert in his wake. The interior of the shop was pleasant and light-filled, with arched stone walls and deep windows. A mottled grey cat was napping in one of them, and raised its head briefly when they entered.

  Alif was surprised to see that the wooden shelves lining the shop were packed more or less equally with books and computer parts: old tomes bound in leather, paperback novels in several languages, clumsy motherboards from the early Nineties, third-generation optical drives less than a year out of beta.

  “Is this a bookstore or a computer store or what?” he asked. “Who shops here?”

  Sakina laughed without unkindness.

  “What third-born questions,” she said. “This is neither a bookstore nor a computer store, Alif. I trade in information, no matter what form it takes. People come here when they wish to buy or barter knowledge.”

  “Oh.” Alif wished he hadn’t spoken. He gazed pensively at a quad-core processor sitting on a shelf at eye level. Sakina looked at Vikram.

  “Computers and books,” she said. “Does that mean he can’t see the other things?”

  “Probably not,” said Vikram, giving a fond slap to the back of Alif ’s neck. “He’s still made of mud, after all.”

  With a curse, Alif twisted away from Vikram, rubbing his neck. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here,” he snapped. Sakina gave him a pretty smile.

  “Forgive us. It’s only that you aren’t quite here, you see. Or to put it another way, we’re not wholly visible to each other. It’s as if you and I are talking on the phone, but Vikram and I are talking in person. It makes it tempting for us to speak over you.”

  Helpless, Alif sat down on the floor with a sigh.

  “Fine, whatever,” he muttered. “This was all Vikram’s idea to begin with.”

  “What a beautiful space,” said the convert in English, speaking up for the first time. “Thank you for inviting us here.”

  Alif felt the need to make up for her absurdity, and therefore his own; to justify their incompetence in some way.

  “I think the convert’s phone is getting a bad signal,” he jested weakly.

  Sakina laughed again in a polite, accommodating way.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It is this way for many of the tribe of Adam. If her sight was entirely veiled, she wouldn’t have been able to come here at all. So that’s something.”

  Alif nodded as though he understood what she was talking about. Sakina sat on the floor and placed the Alf Yeom in front of her, giving it a quizzical look, as though she had divined from it some hidden meaning. Vikram slid to the ground next to the convert, observing her blank face with wolfish amusement.

  “So it’s true—it’s been found. This is the Moqlas manuscript, is it not?” Sakina asked Alif.

  Alif was glad to field a question he could actually answer.

  “Yes,” he said, “Or at least, that’s what the small amount of research I was able to do suggested.”

  “I believe you were correct in your findings,” said Sakina. “When the Alf Yeom was first dictated to a human being by one of our kind many hundreds of years ago, that man—his name was Reza—made four copies. He was a member of a heretical sect called the Battini—they lived in Persia and were connected to the Assassins. Perhaps you’ve heard of those. Anyway. The manuscripts were passed down through the Battini from master to student. Each generation attempted to discover what they believed was secret knowledge hidden within the text, through which they expected to gain supernatural powers. None succeeded.”

  “Is it possible?” Alif interrupted. “Do you get superpowers if you figure out what the trick is? I mean, if there is a trick?”

  Sakina chuckled. “There is no trick—it is simply that your kind and mine see the world differently, and that is that. The transcendent aspect of the Thousand Days is apparent only to the hidden folk. Although—” she paused, glancing up at a microprocessor on a shelf above her.

  “Although what?”

  “I have often wondered whether you are getting close,” she said slowly. “Most of my people disagree with me, but I believe that with the advent of what you call the digital age you have breached a kind of barrier between symbol and symbolized. It doesn’t mean the Alf Yeom will make any more sense to you, but it may mean you have grasped something vital about the nature of information. You are the chosen race, after all—our ancestors were commanded to bow to your progenitor in the Foretime. And it was one of your kind who brought forth the Criterion, not one of ours.”

  “What Criterion is that?” Alif leaned forward, intent on her serious face.

  Sakina looked bemused.

  “Surely you must know, given your real name.”

  “But I thought—how do you know my real name? I didn’t hear Vikram mention it.”

  “I didn’t need to,” said Vikram, playing with the hem of the convert’s skirt. She appeared not to notice. “Since I know what it is, it is implied by your chosen name every time I say it. That’s why it’s dangerous to tell a jinn your real name if you’d rather he didn’t know.”

  “That’s Dina’s fault,” muttered Alif. “She refuses to call me anything else.”

  “It’s a blessed name,” said Sakina. “I don’t see why you should be ashamed of it.”

  “It’s common. It’s everybody’s name. I wanted to be different.”

  “Even so.”

  Alif ran a hand restlessly through his unkempt hair.

  “Whatever. That’s not the point. What’s this Criterion?”

  Sakina pointed to a shelf behind his shoulder. “Al Furqan, of course. The book.”

  Alif turned and looked: in a cradle, bound in green leather, was a copy of the Quran.

  “Oh,” he said.

  There was a pause in which Alif felt
sheepish and small. Sakina and Vikram looked at one another in catlike communion, saying nothing, smiling in one simultaneous instant.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sakina, breaking the spell. “We got lost in thought. Where was I?”

  “The Battini,” said Alif. “And Moqlas.”

  “Yes. Two of the four copies were destroyed in Isfahan when Shah Abbas shut down the Battini school there in the early seventeenth century. Another was lost in a fire fifty years later at the Battini outpost in Cairo. By the end of the seventeenth century only a single copy remained, and it was this copy that Moqlas inherited. It’s said that he dictated the stories to a Frenchman, who translated them into his own language, though I am told the translation is not taken very seriously.”

  “De la Croix,” Alif said. “Everybody thought he’d made it all up.”

  “Made it all up,” echoed the convert.

  “All translations are made up,” opined Vikram, “Languages are different for a reason. You can’t move ideas between them without losing something. The Arabs are the only ones who’ve figured this out. They have the sense to call non-Arabic versions of the Criterion interpretations, not translations.”

  “So the French translation,” said Alif, “That doesn’t qualify as a real version of the Alf Yeom?”

  Vikram gave him a disgusted look. “Is anything real in French?” he asked.

  “When Moqlas died, the remaining manuscript of the Alf Yeom went missing,” Sakina continued. “The Battini school died out, ending their days as hashish-addled wanderers bemoaning their bad luck. No word was heard of the manuscript again—that is, until several months ago.”

  Alif ’s left leg had gone to sleep. He shifted, feeling pins and needles break out in his calf and foot.

  “What happened then?” He felt like a child listening to a bedtime story.

  “There was a rumor that a young noblewoman from one of the emirates had identified the manuscript through a rare bookseller in Damascus, and paid a small fortune for it. No one was able to confirm this. But there was a man—one of your tribe, a beni Adam they call falling star—who was convinced enough to recruit some very dangerous company to look for it, and her.”