Alif the Unseen

by G. Willow Wilson

  The doorman looked stunned. His cheeks fluttered. The grip on Alif ’s arm slackened, and he twisted free. Bolting up the street, he paused long enough to look over his shoulder, guilt and contempt warring in his chest as he saw the doorman staring after him, shoulders slumped, the feather in his absurd turban drooping in the heat.

  Near the top of the hill, the street branched into two. Alif swerved left and stumbled over a traffic bump, then again on a loose flagstone, cursing all the while. Something buzzed past his ear. He yelped and flinched, convinced it was a bullet. Women’s voices floated out the open door of a shop on his right. Without thinking, Alif changed course, rushing inside to shrieks of dismay. A profusion of ladies’ gear greeted him: shoes on stands, purses on racks, gloves on tables. He knocked over a jewelry display as he stumbled on, seeking the back exit; a fresh volley of shrieks followed him, and he felt a stinging blow on the back of his head.

  “I just need the back door, damn it!” he screamed, fending off more blows with his arm.

  Unseen hands shoved him toward a door marked Employee propped open with a rock. He rushed through it, half-leaping over the lintel, and found himself in another alley. The backs of buildings obscured his view of the mosque. He spun in a frantic circle, hoping for some landmark to guide him, and found none. Weeping openly now, he sprinted onward in the first direction that presented itself, past a row of cats watching coolly from a garbage heap.

  He turned one corner, then another, rushing through clusters of men in tailored white thobes. He had neither changed nor shaved in two days, and knew full well he looked like someone’s thieving garden boy on the run. These men, these women, would have no qualms pointing the security police in the direction he had gone; would complain to each other about how dishonest maids and drivers had become these days. He could not stop now. In Baqara District it might be different; in Baqara District people knew about injustice. Here he was alone.

  “Stop him, stop him!”

  Alif turned to see his three pursuers panting up the street. He surged on, given fresh momentum by fear, and nearly toppled an old man fondling a string of prayer beads.

  “Sorry,” he gasped. The man made a private remark to God. Alif took a wrong step and fell. As his knee came down hard on the flagstones, he wondered if the man had evil-eyed him.

  “Damn it,” said Alif, uncertain if he was addressing the old man or the Almighty, “It’s not my fault!” Bursts of pain flared in his right knee, keeping time with his heartbeat. He lurched to his feet and ignored them. The men from State would surely catch him now. He staggered around another corner, under an old carved arch, and sent up his own prayer in half-formed desperate thoughts.

  The mosque appeared in front of him at the end of a narrow street, reaching toward the sun stone by stone, as if summoned. Alif cried out in relief. He jogged toward it and winced, limping the last few feet to its massive copper doors. Age had turned them a flat shade of green, such that the old songs about Basheera’s shining gates no longer made sense, but Alif greeted them like lost friends. He pushed his way inside.

  The interior of the mosque was dim. The only illumination came from five circular skylights built into the dome, letting geometric columns of sun and air into the prayer space. All the electric lights were switched off—the midday prayer had been over for an hour, and no worshippers remained. Alif quieted his breathing and slipped along one wall. There was noise coming from somewhere in the murk—the incongruous sound of an old violin recording. It was an Egyptian folk song in a wry, diffident key, and for an instant Alif was reminded of the way Dina shrugged when confronted with a question for which she had no answer.

  “God forgive us, man! Your shoes!”

  Alif spun around in terror. A leathery sheikh wearing a turban and a brown cloak was coming toward him from the opposite end of the room.

  “What do you mean by this disrespect? Are you mad?” The sheikh halted in front of Alif and squinted at him indignantly. His eyes were a rheumy, unfocused blue. “Are you a Muslim, sir?” he asked, switching to Urdu.

  “I’m sorry,” Alif stuttered in Arabic, “Yes, I am, but I’m in terrible trouble and shoes are the last thing on my mind.”

  “Trouble?”

  Someone pounded on the outside of the main doors. Alif froze. The sheikh considered him for a fraction of a second.

  “Keep moving,” he muttered, “My office is through the arch on the far side of the musala. When you get there, ask our Lord’s forgiveness for your dirty feet.”

  Alif hurried to obey him. As he slipped through the arch he heard the great doors open and a terse voice ask whether the sheikh had seen a young man in a black teeshirt come into the mosque. Flattening himself against the rounded edge of the archway, Alif listened.

  “My eyes are not the best anymore,” said the sheikh, “And I’m afraid I have just closed up the musala. You’ll have to come back for the mid afternoon prayer.”

  “Nonsense. We have the authority to search the whole mosque anytime we please.”The voice was fat and guttural.

  “Whose authority?” the sheikh asked.

  “State’s, you impudent old man—what other kind is there?”

  “God’s,” he answered serenely. There was a pause.

  “Maybe we should clear this with Religious Oversight first,” said a second voice in a quieter tone.

  “Search the place now if you like,” the sheikh’s voice continued, “But I must insist you take off your shoes and make ablution first. This is a place of worship. I won’t have it polluted with unclean feet or unclean thoughts.”

  “He didn’t mean to insult you, Uncle,” said the second voice apologetically.

  “Really? Well, he must have a natural talent.”

  There was another pause. Alif heard shuffling feet.

  “Is that music?” came the fat voice.

  “And if it is?”

  “Music in a mosque?”

  “How convenient that you have suddenly found your piety,” the sheikh snapped. “Basheera has been under my care for longer than you’ve been alive, and I’ve never had any complaints. Now, I’ve told you the prayer hall is closed and my eyes are failing. Clearly I can be of no help to you. I hope you find whoever it is you’re looking for.”

  “If we don’t, we’re coming back with a warrant from Religious Oversight,” said the fat voice. “And God help you then.”

  “He often does,” said the sheikh.

  The doors rumbled shut. Alif slid to the floor with his back against the arch, realizing how dangerously close he had come to soiling himself. It was over now. He wiped his sweating, tearstreaked face on the hem of his teeshirt. The sheikh walked swiftly toward him across the faded carpet of the musala, bending once with a sigh to examine a clod of dirt left behind by Alif ’s shoe.

  “Your path of destruction will need to be scrubbed,” he said as he reached the far end, “I hope I can count on you to volunteer.”

  “Of course,” said Alif, “Anything.”

  The sheikh peered down at Alif through his milky eyes.

  “You’re just a boy!” he exclaimed. “Or barely a man, at any rate. What have you done that’s got State Security so worked up? Are you a terrorist?”

  “I’m a computer programmer. I help—I help whoever asks me.”

  “Meaning the Islamists?”

  Alif let his head drop miserably to his knees.

  “Islamists, anarchists, secularists—whoever asks.”

  “God have mercy upon us. A man of principle. My name is Bilal—Sheikh Bilal, they call me. Don’t tell me your own name, it’s better I not know. Come into my office—you need a wash and a cup of tea.”

  * * *

  The sheikh’s office was an old stone room off the musala with a wooden-latticed window that looked on to a courtyard. A roll top desk stood against one wall, piled high with books and forms and loose paper clips. It was called the Morocco Room, the sheikh said, because in the old days madrassa students from Nort
h Africa gathered there to listen to lectures in their own dialect. After Alif stowed his backpack in a corner the sheikh showed him to a small washroom down a corridor.

  “Make sure to wash your feet!” he said, handing Alif a towel, “Use the lower tap, that’s what it’s there for. Do you take sugar? I make tea the Egyptian way: dark, with mint. None of this womanish milk chai you desis brought with you. I’ll wait for you down the hall.”

  He turned, gathering his robes about him, and went back toward the office. Alif rolled up the cuffs of his pants and turned on the tap, letting tepid water gush over his hot feet. It was so pleasant that he stripped bare and performed a sketchy wash of his entire body, watching the accumulated dust of the past two days run off his skin in rivulets. He pressed his forehead against the dingy tile wall. There was a fresco of octagonal stars picked out in green at eye level; an institutional mosque design, ordinary, reassuring. He allowed himself to feel safe. Strains of the sheikh’s violin recording echoed from the corners of the washroom, growing louder or softer depending on how Alif turned his head to listen.

  Cooler and cleaner, Alif re-dressed, carrying his shoes gingerly by two fingers as he padded barefoot down the corridor. Sheikh Bilal was in his office, measuring out spoonfuls of sugar into two tea glasses. A tin pot let off steam as it boiled on a hotplate in the corner. Alif moved a stack of newspapers off a chair near the sheikh’s desk and sat down.

  “There! Much better.” The sheikh handed Alif a glass of dark red tea in which a spring of mint was steeping. “You look less like a ruffian and more like what you claim to be. I thought you might be trying to fool an old man into letting you rob the joint.”

  “I’m not a thief,” said Alif.

  “I believe you. But what made you come here of all places? Surely it would have been wiser to find a good lawyer.”

  Alif laughed soundlessly. “I’m past needing a lawyer, sheikh uncle. I’d be better off arranging my funeral rites. I thought—well, it’s silly.”

  “Possibly so, but tell me anyway.”

  “I thought there was no way they could drag me out of a mosque. Especially this mosque.”

  Sheikh Bilal’s expression grew serious. He took a sip of tea, sucking the liquid between his teeth before swallowing.

  “There was a point in history when you might have been right about that,” he said. “But not now.” His eyes wandered to the woodlatticed window. Strong sunlight cast a woven shadow across the floor and the hem of his robe.

  “For many centuries the Emirs answered to us, you see,” he continued. “To the ulema of Al Basheera. Back then the protection of this mosque would have meant something. We ran the university and acted as judges for the common folk—during the Middle Ages they say we even ran a well-respected bank. Credit, my boy! Invented by the Arabs.”

  “I’m half Arab,” said Alif, irritated.

  “Oh?” Sheikh Bilal blinked at him. “Yes, perhaps you are. At any rate. The Emirs were enforcers. They protected the City, protected us, sent the young men off to war when they got too rambunctious.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oil.”The sheikh shook his head. “The great cursed wealth from beneath the ground that the Prophet foresaw would destroy us. And statehood—what a terrible idea that was, eh? This part of the world was never meant to function that way.Too many languages, too many tribes, too motivated by ideas those high-heeled cartographers from Paris couldn’t understand. Don’t understand. Will never understand. Well, God save them—they’re not the ones who have to live in this mess. They said a modern state needs a single leader, a secular leader, and the Emir was the closest thing we had. So to the Emir went all the power. And anyone who thinks that isn’t a good idea is hounded down and tossed in jail, as you have so recently discovered. All so that some pantywaist royal nephew can have a seat at the UN and carry a flag in the Olympics and be thoroughly ignored.”

  “This is treason,” said Alif with a nervous giggle.

  “Don’t I know it! Never fear, I’m completely domesticated. I don’t give Friday sermons anymore, but when I did, I glossed over the latest jailed journalist or disappeared dissident like everyone else, and prayed for the health of the Emir and the Princess to boot. Yes, I know what’s good for me.” Sheikh Bilal tossed back the last of his tea and set the glass on his desk with a loud clank.

  “Now, if you’re finished, I will find you a bucket and some soap and you can get to work on the carpet.”

  Sheikh Bilal sat in a chair and directed Alif as he scrubbed at his footprints with a horse-hair brush, pointing out debris he had missed. Alif hadn’t realized his shoes were so dirty. With growing mortification, he thought back to the mud and donkey shit of the Place of Trash and the well-watered soil of the little date palm grove in Baqara District. His path had taken him across more than a dozen prayer niches printed on the wall-to-wall carpet of the musala, prefabricated substitutions for the handwoven mats men once brought with them from home. His knees quickly grew tired and damp as he worked his way backward toward the mosque’s main doors.

  “I don’t see why this needs to be such a production,” he muttered, leaning into the brush. “It’s just some dirt. The people who come to pray walk through it to get here.”

  “Spiritual technology, my boy!” said Sheikh Bilal. “The dirt on your shoes is ritually unclean even if it is practically unavoidable. Ritual law is not required to make sense to us mortals, it is enough that it makes sense to God. When you pray all your actions must fit together like gears in a great machine—like one of your computers.”

  “Computers don’t have gears.”

  “Don’t be obstinate, it’s not attractive in someone so young. I know you understand what I mean. Two hundred years ago, would anyone, even the most learned scientist, believe you if you told him one day men would walk on the moon and send information through the very air? I will supply my own response: no. But today these are unremarkable events. Perhaps the same is true of ritual—perhaps on the Day of Days the schematic of God’s great machine will be as obvious to you as the code in your programs.”

  Alif sat down and stretched his legs.

  “It’s not always like that. The reason I came running in here is because—” He paused, and elected to tell a half-truth. There was no need to bring jinn into the equation. “I wrote a program and I don’t really understand why it works, and now the government has it.”

  Sheikh Bilal leaned forward. “Now that is interesting. What does it do, this program?”

  “It can tell who people are by analyzing what they type.”

  “Yes, that is just the sort of thing State would love. But there is a girl mixed up in all of this, I have no doubt. In a lovely silk veil, whose modesty does not prevent her from using more eye makeup than several Fifi Abdous.”

  Bewildered, Alif ’s gaze skittered from the soapy carpet to the sheikh and back again. He wondered if the old man might be a spy, and whether the wet horsehair brush could serve him as a weapon while he made his escape.

  “Don’t look so startled. You have that sullen expression young men get when they’ve been jilted. It’s why men are meant to have beards—growing all that hair leaves no energy for moodiness. Much more dignified.”

  Alif touched the stubble on his chin doubtfully. Sheikh Bilal chuckled, folding back the sleeves of his robe and dabbing his wrists with oil from a small glass vial.

  “Lotus oil? It helps in this heat. Am I right about the girl?”

  “I never noticed that she used too much eye makeup,” Alif mumbled. “She looked fine to me.”

  “I’m sure she did. What, did she say she wouldn’t marry you? Not enough money, apartment not big enough, and that skin— well, it is a shame you take after the desi side. Girls these days are a frivolous bunch.”

  “It was her father,” said Alif. “He’s forcing her to marry someone else. Someone who doesn’t love her—someone who only wants to use her to increase his own power.”

  The sheikh�
�s expression changed. “Hmm. That may be—or it may not. In my experience, a treasured daughter can usually get her way when it comes to these things.”

  “I know Intisar doesn’t want this man,” Alif said hotly. “She was crying when I last saw her, crying—”

  “All right, all right.” Sheikh Bilal leaned back in his chair. “She is betrothed to this other man and breaks it off with you. What do you do next?”

  Alif flicked a soap bubble with his finger. When framed so bluntly, his reaction to Intisar’s betrayal seemed hysterical, unnecessary. Why had he bothered to write Tin Sari? Why had he not simply erased her number from his phone and deleted her emails? It would have been easy enough to avoid her.

  “She said she never wanted to see my name again,” he said. “So I wrote this program that would identify her no matter what computer or email address she might use. Then I told my system to block her whenever it found her, and make it look like I didn’t exist.”

  “And the government censors found this program, and your goose is cooked.”

  “Something like that.” Alif elected not to mention the other reason for the Hand’s vendetta.

  “Well well. You have pious instincts for someone who looks like such a heathen. Not many men use the internet for so high-handed a purpose as discretion.”

  “I’m not as good as all that,” said Alif, chucking his brush back into the bucket of soapy water. “I could still see her. Online I mean. I still had access to her machine.”

  “That was very wrong of you. It is only given to women to see without being seen—men must act in the open or not at all.”

  “You’ve gone metaphysical. Can I stop scrubbing? My knees ache.”

  Sheikh Bilal examined the trail of suds leading back toward his office. “No no. You’ve got another six feet until you reach the door. If you rally your energy you could be done in ten minutes.”

  Alif slopped more water on the floor and dragged the brush in circles over a new footprint.