Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  the teeth in the night, approaching

  red the sky

  stars turn and dance

  the cathedral of black stone has shattered

  the cathedral has been buried

  water seethes at the foot of the cliff

  in the snow we come, in the sand we come, from the waves we come

  a curl

  a curling plume of burning flesh

  dance to the

  stars

  I woke up slowly, not the way she always did, snapping awake, and became aware of the airplane’s hum, my dry, sticky mouth, the blanket sliding off my shoulders, looking automatically for Johnny. Bad dreams, I thought. Proximity effects. I thought about telling her I’d had another one, letting her do some dream interpretation or whatever, but there was something strange about her. She was awake, alert, hilariously so, like a cartoon of herself—still wrapped in the blanket, only her nose and her wide, alarmed eyes showing. I followed her gaze to two pretty flight attendants chatting near the cockpit door, not in English.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  She glanced quickly at me, then back to them. But it wasn’t till they eventually wandered off that she turned and whispered “Go get your bag out of the overhead storage bin. When we land, put the strap across your body.”

  “...Why?”

  “Because we’re going to be held in custody at the airport and I want you to have it on you in a way that they can’t easily grab it off.”

  “What? We’re going to be arrested? For what?”

  “Not arrested. Held in custody. For our own safety.”

  And I looked at her grey face over the blanket, stony with not just anticipation but rage, and thought: Oh shit. Rutger. We asked him not to tell, she made him promise not to tell, but we both saw his face as we left, and he told. She was gone all the time without comment, but now we had been reported as missing.

  I thought: We’re going to be put right on a plane back home as soon as we land. If we’re lucky. If we’re not...

  I pictured a tiny room crawling with earwigs and cockroaches and scorpions. Dusty, terracotta light, unchanged for hundreds of years. Like the scenes in Robin Hood or The Mummy. Screams from down the hall, the sound of a metal rod scraping on the bars of our cells... no phone calls allowed and the only person I could think to call buckled over the stinking pail in her cell a few feet away, or with a guard pinning her to the wall with his crotch... oh man, why hadn’t they just put me in jail on our end of this fucking trip?

  “Look, stay calm,” she said. “Remember your bag. We need those papers. The language keys are in there and I can’t work without those.”

  “Stay calm, she says. You got a plan for this, Li’l Miss I Have a Plan for Everything?”

  “Gather relevant data, formulate next steps, implement, return to original parameters,” she said, blinking innocently at me. “The usual.”

  “Isn’t that what you said right before we tried to eat ten pounds of marshmallow bananas at your grandma’s house?”

  “Shut up.”

  How would it go down, I wondered. Did they have guns, or Tasers, or those tranquilizer things that, ironically, Johnny herself had invented? Nowhere you looked was free from her touch. Nowhere good. Nowhere bad. Eventually it would get all garbled and the history books would say she had invented electricity and screws and the horseless carriage and the letter E. Before dying at the tragic age of seventeen, I added. Good thing she’d started early.

  Sweat kept breaking out on my skin in visible, tiny droplets, then evaporating, leaving me chilled. I wrapped up in my blanket and sweated and worried, teeth chattering. Would they tackle us? Shoot us? Quietly pull us aside? I doubted it, knowing what I knew about the Middle East, which wasn’t much, just a few dozen viewings of Aladdin with the kids; and the news now, shouting about Saddam, oil prices, embargoes, terrorist groups in the desert, the smashed Bamiyan Buddhas that Johnny had sobbed over. I barely knew what people looked like where we were going, even, except angry brown men with moustaches, and women in masks or veils. Just the stuff they showed on CNN. Jesus. Custody, I thought. We hadn’t done anything illegal except the faked passport. They weren’t going after real criminals, right? Just runaways. They had been told that.

  Right?

  It’s so tough to be young; it’s so tough that the only way I assume adults are able to function is that they have forgotten this, that they don’t remember a time when they didn’t know anything and knowledge was kept from them, and they railed at the gatekeepers. And whatever the gatekeepers were—time, bosses, parents, teachers, luck—they would not have remembered being young either. School was a fucking waste if all it did was let you graduate with a head full of questions and no way to get them answered. And always, always knowing less than Johnny.

  And even so, she’d never be able to talk our way out of this. I looked down at my hands: a shine, then dull again. As if waves were crashing over me, cold, heavy. What if Rutger had let something slip to the news, what if wherever Mom was, she was watching CNN and wondering what the hell was going on, and why we were going to Morocco, of all places? She’d be trying to explain it to the kids—and the boys wouldn’t even be worried, they’d think it was an adventure, that I’d gone on vacation with Auntie Johnny. It would be Carla who would see through it, who would worry and cry and fret till her stomach hurt.

  “How long till we land?” I asked Johnny, who was nipping at her water bottle and swirling it around her mouth, a nervous tic that had earned her an unfair reputation in the press as a wine snob.

  “Three hours.”

  Three hours and then the great unknown. Jail, a fifteen-hour flight back. The end of her plan and the end of the world. Or no. The end of... how did she say it? Not the world itself, but the world that didn’t have Them in it. The sky is not the sky; the light is not light.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THEY DID IT when we landed, wordless, simply pulling us aside as we deplaned into an unbelievable blast of heat mixed with icy currents of air conditioning, swirling a weird cyclone of odours into the high ceiling—spices, sweat, lemon floor polish, cigarette smoke, coffee, trash. I got one glance at the sign that said Customs, in English and a dozen other languages, before we were herded away from it, separated from the rest of the passengers.

  A hand clamped hard on my forearm, fingers digging in, and before I could tell them not to touch Johnny—I don’t know why I thought she couldn’t do it herself—the words were whipping out of her, sensuous soft-edged things delivered like the edge of a straight razor. I looked up into scratched aviators over a heavily moustached face, a tan uniform, red-brown face. His expression wasn’t angry, despite the power of his grip. Just... immovable. Like hers. Could not be swayed.

  My head began a slow spin, and I looked over at Johnny just as they put the cuffs on her.

  “Wait,” I finally said, “don’t, don’t do that—”

  My arms were wrenched behind me and something hard and hot went around my wrists—the cuffs must have been in the cop’s pocket, I thought feverishly, to be so hot. They were ready for us. Ready for us to not go quietly.

  Still no one had said a word except for us. Johnny was talking more calmly now, cuffed like me, hands behind her, looking up at the grey-haired cop who had his hand around her upper arm, fully encircling it. They didn’t like girls to have bare arms here, did they? Not like her to forget that. Had she left her jacket on the plane? She was completely white except for two red dots, like stickers, above her eyebrows. I felt boneless with fear, watching her mouth move.

  And suddenly I couldn’t hear what she was saying, because my ears started to ring, a piercing whine.

  “I’m gonna be sick,” I said to the cop, voice already thick with it. “I’m—”

  “What?” he said.

  It all came up, everything I’d eaten on the plane, plus the noodle salad I’d had in Edmonton International, but I’d been drinking so much water that it was a clear jet studd
ed with orange chunks—and why was it always orange, I wondered dimly, coughing and spitting to clear my nose just as another jet burst out. Both cops yowled and stepped back.

  And in that split second, Johnny flattened them both—elbow to the throat, kick to the balls—and grabbed the front of my t-shirt, and we took off.

  I stumbled on my wet shoes, actually falling to my knees at one point with a sickening crack. She hauled me up and hissed “Come on!” but I couldn’t pump my arms, I kept trying to even though I kept also reminding myself that I couldn’t, just wiggling my shoulders like a pigeon. I saw Johnny checking her speed for me, as if shifting down to a lower gear, and felt a brief stab of gratitude and annoyance, cutting through the green haze of the nausea. Someone screamed behind us, loud over the patter of footsteps. I didn’t dare look back. We weren’t even the only ones running in the airport, though most of the others were headed in the opposite direction, towards flights they were about to miss. They made good camouflage, though, as we raced towards the sunlight they were leaving behind.

  Where were we even going? The baggage check carousels were in the way—easily leaped—and then through another, unmanned security gate, and bodies congregating at the door.

  “Quick!” Johnny gasped, and we darted left, my shoes still skidding horrifyingly, into a door marked EMERGENCY EXIT in several languages. It was one of those ones you had to push for thirty seconds before the door opened, but Johnny did something to the wiring under the handle, spun back around, and we were through.

  We banged down a hallway and finally through a set of revolving doors, my bag—my God, how had they let me keep my bag? They must have wanted to search it—briefly getting caught. Then we were free and running into the street, dodging cars and donkeys and horses, miraculously it seemed, before I realized that they were all at a standstill in a miles-long traffic jam surrounding the airport. The air, a damp slap, smelled intensely of unfamiliar things—exhaust, salt, ammonia. The ocean? Where were we?

  It was so hot and bright that my pupils screamed and I felt my stomach heave again, as if it weren’t completely empty, and we pounded through the crowd, deking between dusty bumpers, and out the other side. Huge hotels flashed by, marked with names even I could read: Hilton, Sheraton. What? Not safe yet, I knew; she didn’t have to tell me. Never been so far from home, never been so far.

  We ran and ran, sliding around cars and hopping barriers, past houses and trees and yards, people staring at us in a blur, until I got a stitch and we stumbled to a stop in an alleyway, pressed to a rickety iron gate that flaked rust into my hair as I leaned against it and heaved.

  “We can’t stay here,” Johnny gasped. “We’re still too close to the airport.”

  “I’m good,” I said, but it came out as a croak and I immediately retched again. “Holy shit. What just happened? Where are we?”

  “Casablanca is the best I can do. Otherwise, no idea. I’ll check my map when we stop for real.” She took a breath that wheezed in her lungs like a toy whistle, and pushed something warm into my fingers. “Hold this still.”

  “What am I—”

  “Sunglasses. Grabbed ’em from one of the cops while we were heading out. We can’t keep running with cuffs on. Hold ’em real tight, just like that.”

  She reversed, like backing up to a trailer hitch; I felt her break the arms off, then pop the lenses out of the frames and use my grip to bend and eventually break the cheap rims. My stomach twisted and gurgled, and for a moment I wondered whether it was going to be projectile puking or just a bout of explosive diarrhea right there in the neat, blue-painted alleyway. I pressed my face to the iron gate, a tiny bit cooler than the blast furnace of the day, and willed my insides to shut up.

  “Where did you learn how to pick a handcuff lock?” I said.

  “It’s not that hard. Most of them are just a single tab, and if you push on it hard enough, it... ah.”

  I felt mine go free, and as I turned to thank her I leaned over and puked into the corner again. Nothing came up but a few mouthfuls of water; I guessed it was in reverse order of the things I’d eaten. My nose burned and stung. But I’d put water in both our bags on the plane, and I fumbled at my bag zips while she cursed, muttered, and eventually got her own cuffs off.

  “There. Always easier on someone else’s. Finish that and let’s go.”

  I put the empty bottle back in my bag, and though I didn’t feel any less pukey or lightheaded, I did feel as if I could move now. I followed her out of the alleyway at a fast walk.

  Outside the alley, it was chaos and sun and dust—cars honking, bike couriers zipping past, people with actual donkeys or mules screaming “Balak! Balak!” everyone on the narrow sidewalk shoving and pushing between us. I reached automatically for Johnny’s hand, as if she were one of the kids, but checked myself and instead followed her as close as I could. Sweat sprang out all over my face, trickling down my neck and soaking my hair.

  In the moment of relative safety I craned my head to try to take it all in, wishing I had sunglasses or a hat—it was so bright it just seemed like a spangled kaleidoscope of car windows, men in suits, tiny booths hawking electronics, sunglasses, clothing, CDs, food, tiles, everyone gabbling around me in languages I didn’t know, plus blessedly recognizable if not actually comprehensible French and English. People bumped and buffeted me apparently without even noticing. I had been picturing... I don’t even know what. Some mud-brick city from Raiders of the Lost Ark? Flowing white robes? Tintin books, for absolute sure.

  Not so many trees or plants everywhere, or of so many kinds. Not so many fountains, covered in glossy tile. Lots of men with their cheeks ridged with scars, parallel lines high and fierce on their dark skin, mainly older men. A lot of Western clothes, more than I had pictured, interspersed with the loose robes: university t-shirts, Disney, Looney Tunes, over blue jeans or Gap khakis like Johnny’s. Older cars, newer cars, hundreds or thousands of little motorbikes, barely dirtbikes. Tons of sidewalk cafes with no regard for the rest of the sidewalk, forcing us to step into the street, widely umbrellaed in blue or black. Silver daggers gleamed on the occasional hip. Everything smelled of sweat, onions, herbs. Bicycles everywhere. Most of their solar panels were the old kind Johnny had first invented, black and iridescent, like the feathers of a starling. Everywhere the roofs of buildings looked like dark wings.

  Johnny paused at a stall, negotiated briefly with the bearded man there in French, who kept staring suspiciously at me, and came away with two black-and-white checkered scarves with fringe around them. We ducked into another alleyway, something there was no shortage of in Casablanca apparently, and she showed me how to tie mine around my head before tying hers in a completely different way. After she hit up an ATM in a convenience store—“A haroun,” she explained, “they’re kinda everywhere”—to get a wad of cash, we kept walking, past mud-brick buildings painted in white in an effort to bounce back some of the dry, burning sun. My head felt much cooler in its own coat of white.

  “Sort of a disguise,” she said. “Obviously not great. But it helps us blend.”

  “Yeah. You look much better. Lots of people here have green eyes and you’re almost tan enough to get away with it.”

  “I think that’s my dad’s side,” she said, holding out her bare arms and admiring them next to mine, ringed with red from the cuffs. “I’m almost as dark as you!”

  “You wish.” I looked around, seeing nothing I recognized as a street sign. “Holy shit. We’re in Morocco. Man! Can we check your map here?”

  We pulled into another alley and she got out the tiny laptop she’d built last year, its solar panel flashing onto my face. The screen was hard to see in the sunlight. “Turn. I need some shade. Thanks. Uhh, shit. Jesus. Shit.”

  “Oh, that sounds so hopeful. So encouraging.”

  “I didn’t take into account that we might not be able to use the airport,” she said, pointing at the screen; I didn’t understand what I was looking at, but nodded. Two large roun
d black dots were connected by a long wavery line on the green background, surrounded by smaller dots, none of them labelled. “Because it’s not a long flight to Fes—it’s about an hour—but it’s almost a four-hour drive.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Come on,” she said, starting to walk again, briskly. “I’ll figure something out.”

  WE ENDED UP circling back to the airport like movie spies trying to lose a tail, walking then taking a bus from a random stop, Johnny pushing bills carelessly into the farebox. Even from a distance I could see dozens more uniforms at the airport’s doors than I would have guessed. Not all for us, surely. Or maybe they were for us, because we’d gotten into a fight?

  But the nearby bus depot was so crowded that I doubted anyone would be able to spot us, and half the crowd was wearing scarves like ours. My height was the main conspicuous thing about us—at six feet, barely remarkable back home, I towered over this crowd. I slouched as I followed Johnny.

  The heat was like nothing I’d ever experienced, like being trapped in an oven. Waves of it coming off the white sidewalks, practically a physical force, pushing me around with every step. The occasional humid ocean breeze barely cut through it. She walked purposefully towards the ticket office, elbows out to nudge people aside.

  “Keep a hand and an eye on your bag,” she said. “Thieves like bus stations.”

  “Well, you too, then,” I said, annoyed.

  “Mine’s steel-mesh reinforced and there’s wires in the strap,” she said. “National Geographic Store. Can’t beat it. Here we go. Act surly; they’re not gonna like me doing the talking.”

  “Act surly, she says.”

  Frowning and acting worried was the easiest thing she’d asked of me so far; I scanned the crowd, looking for cop hats and aviator sunglasses. A towering group of white tourists, maybe Swedish—was that the blue flag with the yellow cross on their bags?—argued with someone in an airport uniform, both in heavily accented English. I wondered if either side understood the other. A much larger group of Japanese tourists in matching t-shirts, shepherded by three guides, moved sedately towards a charter bus, shiny and green in the low, gold light. We weren’t using one of those, though, Johnny had said; she wanted something less conspicuous.