Alif the Unseen

by G. Willow Wilson

  “You’re not real,” he said. “I made you up to help me finish the code—you’re a fantasy, you’re in my head—”

  “I am very real,” said the voice from between the bones of Alif ’s skull. “And I am also in your head.”

  Alif ground his hands against his eyes until he saw spots once more.

  “I could have made so much of you,” the voice continued, “If you’d let me. You were so close. A few minutes more and you would have pierced the veil of Heaven itself. All things seen and unseen would have been laid bare in front of you.”

  “It was the wrong way,” said Alif, pressing himself more tightly against the door. “It wouldn’t have worked. The code was too unstable.”

  “You are afraid of your own power.” Alif felt a hand slip between his bare knees. He jerked away.

  “It wouldn’t have worked,” he repeated. “It started to decay in front of my eyes. You saw it. The information had no integrity, no guiding principle. The whole project was collapsing when the computer fused.”

  “Coward,” said the voice, “Fake. You lacked the nerve to see it through.”

  Alif struggled to escape Farukhuaz’s questing fingers. Shuddering currents of revulsion passed through him.

  “Stop it,” he gasped, “Please stop.”

  “What, not a man either? A little piglet.”

  Alif lashed out at the void. His hands encountered cloth, trembling bells, and something awful, like slime; he cried out and fought with greater strength, shoving the viscous thing further into the darkness. It occurred to him to recite the shahada. The thing began to shriek. Encouraged, Alif bellowed every talismanic holy verse he knew, testifying to the oneness of God, the indivisibility of His nature, the perfidy of Satan. The shriek rose to an unnatural decibel, rattling through the room in fading reverberations until it became indistinguishable from the tinnitus inside his own ears.

  Alif ran out of breath. Light flooded the room, sending arcs of pain through his already tender skull. He doubled over, shielding his face with a gasp.

  “Babbling already? That doesn’t speak well of your fortitude. Get up.”

  It was not Farukhuaz’s voice. Squinting, Alif peered toward the speaker: a man stood in the doorway, wearing a thobe so white Alif ’s retinas ached to look at it. He was tall, with a neatly trimmed goatee and a bearing that suggested long-held authority. Alif had trouble focusing, and could not guess the man’s age; tears seeped out when he held his eyes open for more than a moment or two.

  “Get up. I want to look you in the face.”

  Alif struggled to his feet. The room, he now saw, was a bare concrete box, whitewashed with some kind of cheap paint that bore the smudged and foul-looking imprints of dirty fingers and blood and perhaps worse. There was a drain in one corner—not, he realized with regret, the corner he had been using as a urinal.

  The man in the white thobe watched him with a critical air.

  “You look younger than I expected. I know your birth date, naturally—nevertheless, I anticipated you would appear mature for your age. But you haven’t even really filled out yet.”

  Alif remembered his nakedness and flushed, attempting to turn away and hide his most vulnerable parts. There was no manful way to go about it.

  “Please don’t bother,” said the white-robed figure. “This is standard operating procedure. Very effective—isolation, no light, no clothing. We don’t even have to touch people much, these days. Of course, there are exceptions. Some of the more emphatic religious types have been through psychological training, quite rigorous stuff. Impressive really. But every man has his limits.”

  Alif blinked at him stupidly.

  “Every woman as well,” the man continued, running one finger along the wall and rubbing the chalky residue of the paint against his thumb. “But then, God made woman perversely easy to brutalize, didn’t He? It does seem unfair. Don’t you agree?”

  Alif opened and closed his mouth, wondering whether there was some sort of implied threat in the question.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said finally. His voice was hoarse. He was afraid he might start crying again, and gritted his teeth.

  “You wouldn’t know.” The man chuckled. “You’re quite a boy. I’m a little disappointed—one wants to feel respect for one’s enemy. Especially one as talented as you have proven yourself to be. I’m surprised she became attached to you. I would expect her to have better taste.”

  “She?”

  “I can see the mental lethargy has begun to set in. Well and good. Intisar, Alif. You do remember Intisar? I hope you do, since you have had from her that which was due to me by right. One of us ought to have gotten some pleasure or pride out of it.”

  Alif felt his heart jump. He felt thwarted, standing there ridiculous and unclothed; he had always imagined this moment with his hands around the throat of the man standing before him.

  “It’s you,” he rasped. “You’re him. You’re the Hand.”

  The man smiled.

  “If you wish. I’ve never liked that name, flattering as it is. It’s a little overblown. You dissident types do enjoy your amateur theatrics.”

  “You—you’re—” Alif shook with fury. He knew no curses vile enough.

  “The son of a dog, a whore, or what? I’ve heard it all. Let’s skip that and be civil. There will come a point, very soon, when your anger will burn off and be replaced by desperation. You’ll be groveling at my feet, and in such an attitude you’ll wish you’d kept a polite tongue in your head. I’m doing you a favor by warning you now.”

  “I don’t need any warning, you pig-eating ass-coveter.”

  “Creative, very creative. You see how fast one’s mental faculties return when the lights come back on? Light stimulates all the hot spots in the frontal lobe. Without it, even the most civilized philosopher is at the mercy of his primitive brain. I’ve seen respected university professors lose the power of speech after a few months in here. It even works on the blind, if you can believe that. They can’t see the light but their brains still perceive it at some level. Unless they’ve been recently blinded—no longterm neural adaptation in that case. Speeds things up tremendously.”

  Alif felt several of his bodily organs recoil.

  “How long have I been in here?” he asked in a different tone.

  The Hand chuckled. “If I told you that, it would undo all the good work you’ve already put into your own psychological deconstruction.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  The Hand’s smile faded. “What a banal question,” he said softly. With one hand he adjusted the pointed edge of his head covering. He held it between his fingers for a moment with an expression Alif couldn’t read, examining a crease in the white cloth. “How long have we been playing this game, Alif ? Back and forth, State and insurgency, firewalls and viruses. Your entire adult life. Many precious years of mine. No progress, no victory for either side. Finally I thought I had an edge—I knew the Thousand Days was real, and I had a powerful intuition—a vision, almost—about what I could do with it. Those hash-smoking medieval mystics didn’t really understand what they meant when they talked about the Philosopher’s Stone. They didn’t have the same intellectual or technological resources we do. The human mind isn’t set up to make as many calculations as you would need for a multivalent coded manuscript like the Days useful in any way. But a computer is.”

  “It didn’t work,” said Alif.

  The Hand ignored him. He studied Alif with detached curiosity, his eyes lingering on the younger man’s nicked, stubbled chin.

  “We all get off on the same thing, that’s the problem,” he said. “You don’t really care about revolution, I don’t really care about the State. What gets us hard is the code itself. I created what I believed to be the most beautiful suite of security programs ever made, a continuation of the sinews of my own flesh, in some way. I thought that was winning. It certainly helped me track down a lot of your friends. But never you—you remai
ned maddeningly hidden. And then you stole the greatest idea I’d ever had, and used it to destroy my life’s work.”

  “I’m better than you,” Alif said, slurring his words. He wondered whether the Hand was right about the effect of light on his mind.

  “I think you’re probably right,” said the Hand, without apparent offense. “For me programming was never an intuitive process. I studied very hard while all my classmates slacked off, knowing that government jobs were waiting for them whether they did well in school or not. I wasn’t different because I had any special gift for computers—I was different because I had ambition. I was as angry at the State as you are, once—not for the same reasons, but angry nonetheless. I had no desire to lie around a villa and screw an endless parade of terrified housemaids, or sit in an office with a bunch of fat, lethargic princes, pretending to run an emirate. I saw what kind of security apparatus our vast resources were capable of creating, and I decided to unleash them. God knows no one else would have taken the trouble.”

  “You’re a fucking tyrant,” said Alif.

  “What other kind of man do the peasants respect in this part of the world? Come on, Alif. Tell me what you honestly envision for the City. A democracy? Plato’s Republic? You’ve imbibed too much western propaganda. Give the citizens of our fair seaport a real vote and they will do one of three things: vote for their own tribe, vote for the Islamists, or vote for whoever paid them the most money.”The Hand’s eyes twinkled. “Would you like to cast bets about the kind of treatment a person like you would get if the Islamists came to power?”

  “They’d probably make me caliph,” muttered Alif. “I designed their whole email encryption setup from scratch.”

  “They’d stone you to death for adultery. Don’t imagine for a moment that they’d bother with the nicety of four witnesses to prove your guilt.”

  Alif felt his anger returning. “I’ve never committed adultery,” he said. “Intisar is my wife in the sight of God.”The words sounded profane as soon as he said them. He did not love her. The promise he had made to Dina, the promise she had prompted from his guts and his loins and his heart by showing him her face, was greater than his furtive union with another woman.

  “Oh, you’ve signed a precious little piece of paper. I don’t suppose you bothered with witnesses either.”

  Alif was forced to admit he had not.

  “You see? You’re as much a hypocrite as your bearded friends. Your marriage isn’t valid in the eyes of God or anyone else. This is what kills me—why can’t we be honest with ourselves? Why must we drag God into each of our sins? You wanted to go to bed with Intisar, so you did. Better to be an honest fornicator than a false pietist.”

  A retort died on Alif ’s tongue, killed by a grudging sense of relief.

  “Am I supposed to admire your honesty?” he said finally, “Is that it?”

  “I had hoped you would.” The Hand looked a little sad. “I imagined our first conversation playing out in a very different way. I thought you would divine the purpose of my bringing you here more readily.”

  Alif blinked away tears in the bright light.

  “You’re here because I’ve won,” said the Hand. His mouth settled into an unfriendly line. “You asked what I want from you—I should think it would be obvious, but since it isn’t, I’ll tell you. I’ve won. Even though you took my trump card and used it against me, I’ve won. I want that realization to settle over you like a premonition of death. I want your defeat to seep into your bones as you sit naked in the dark, watching your life and your sanity spool away before you into nothingness. I want to watch each of your intellectual powers drop away one by one until you are a quivering, pissing mess at my feet. By then I will have gotten what little information I require from you to rebuild my system. You will become useless to me. At that point, I will allow you to die. Perhaps I will even have you executed, though most probably I will starve you to death instead. The idea of watching you eat your own fingernails in desperation is appealing.”

  Alif ’s breathing became labored. He looked the Hand in the face, ignoring the tears that streamed from his smarting, dilated eyes. The fear was so intense that it was indistinguishable from euphoria, and gave him strength.

  “I will live to watch you thrown to the dogs,” he said quietly.

  The Hand laughed.

  “You wish.” He turned to leave, rapping on the door in the far wall of the room. It opened from outside with a loud clank.

  “Next time,” he said over his shoulder, “We will talk more about the book.”

  * * *

  After that, they began to feed him. Every so often a slat would open in the door—no light accompanied it—and a tray was shoved through into Alif ’s cell. He did not believe that these meals, usually bread and lentils, came at regular intervals; sometimes he was still full when the next one arrived, yet at other times he was ravenously hungry for what seemed like days before the slat opened again. He suspected the uncertainty was part of the Hand’s procedure, designed to keep him anxious, or to further elide his sense of time. Alif learned to jump up at the sound of the slat opening; if he did not, the tray would clatter to the ground in an inedible mess. A paranoid certainty settled over him, and he was convinced that each meal was his last, inaugurating the Hand’s threat of starvation.

  A beard grew on his face. He tried to guess the number of days of his confinement by the length of the hair, but it proved impossible; the only time he’d ever had more than a few days’-worth of growth was when he had coded Hollywood. It simply grew, and at one point he woke to discover a full fist-length under his chin. Very soon after, the lights came on again and revealed two State security agents, who dragged him down a corridor to another bare room to hose him down and scrub him with a wide brush meant for the floor. Alif had howled in pain, headless of his dignity; he howled again when they took a razor to his head and face, removing all hair from both and leaving him nicked and bleeding. For a time he fantasized that they had read his mind, and did not touch his face to judge the length of the hair there.

  He began to speak to himself in an attempt to stave off the lizardlike haze fast settling over his mind. It started, he thought, as a rational exercise, a method of self-preservation. He recited song lyrics, as many as he could think of, jogging his sluggish and increasingly nonverbal memory for fragments of things he’d heard on the radio once he had run through several albums of Abida Parveen and The Cure. He would stop when his voice was hoarse, satisfied by this quota of mental exercise. Soon enough, however, the tenor of these monologues changed, and he would wake from a half-daze at the sound of his own babbling, halting in the middle of pronouncements that did not seem to contain words.

  Panic returned then; slow, oozing panic that seemed to emanate from his pores in a foul-smelling sweat. He found himself calling for Vikram, in the insensible hope that the creature would appear from between the cracks in the wall and free him amidst a volley of insults. But Vikram did not come, and with a dread that originated in some uncorrupted part of his soul Alif knew Farukhuaz had spoken the truth. He mourned, grateful to be shaken by a feeling that fed on something higher than animal adrenaline. Supplications for Vikram’s soul flew out of the darkness, and for the woman he had taken with him. He did not say her name, worried that the Hand might be listening, but he projected the image of her naked face with all his might, until he believed he could see it hanging in front of him, a truer darkness than the one that blotted out his sight.

  Farukhuaz he could sense. She—or it, the primordial thingness of her, invented yet eternal—lurked at the edge of his perception like a cautious predator waiting for its prey to tire. Of Farukhuaz he was most afraid, certain now of what it truly was, and when he could remember, while he could remember, he recited holy verses under his breath. He felt like a charlatan; he knew it could see the indifference of his faith. As his verbal self declined, he felt it getting closer, a fetid presence that stalked his shrinking perimeter of sanity.<
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  When the Hand appeared again, Alif was glad to see him. “Thin and disgusting,” the Hand said approvingly while Alif wept in the bright light, unable to keep his eyes lubricated against its sudden luminous influx.

  “Alive,” Alif croaked.

  “Yes, for as long as it suits me. Look, I’ve brought you a chair.” He unfolded a metal object and placed it in front of Alif. Alif peered at it, and deciding it was what the Hand claimed it to be, sat down. The laminated seat was cool against his cramped muscles.

  “So.” The Hand produced another chair, sat, and folded his hands in his lap. “What have you been doing to occupy yourself ? The guards say you sing. And spout nonsense.”

  “Keeping busy,” said Alif.

  “Yes, a good idea. Hallucinating yet?”

  “I’m being watched by the devil.”

  The Hand chuckled.

  “Naturally. He’s a very common guest down here. A lot of inmates see him. Then again, the really crazy ones see Gabriel, and the ones even crazier than that see God.”

  “Saw the devil before you locked me in this shithole. He came out of that book of yours.”

  The Hand looked displeased.

  “Don’t be such a pietist. There is no such thing as evil knowledge.”

  “I used to think so too,” said Alif.

  “Then you’ve begun right and ended wrong. I was the opposite—when I began to discover the unseen, I had as many spiritual qualms as my childhood Quran teacher could have wished. Then again, my introduction to the hidden folk was mostly an accident. I began researching magic as a purely intellectual exercise. I hoped it would broaden my understanding of code. Our impulse to store and access data through coding languages predates computers by thousands of years, and that’s really all magic is. I was simply looking for a fresh perspective. The first time I tried to summon a demon, I wasn’t expecting anything to come of it.”

  “What happened?”

  The Hand’s smile was mechanical. His teeth gleamed like polished metal in the strong light.

  “What do you suppose? It worked.”