The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  A thin smile of derision appeared on Costello’s lips and he snorted softly. “What, you think it’s a funny idea?” Mustafa said. “I assure you, my superiors would have no problem believing such a thing . . . I’d be inclined to believe it myself, if this were 1981 and the Israelis had just blown up the nuclear reactor in Suffolk. But there’s been no new provocation, and for all his bluster, I don’t think either the prime minister or the men who pull his strings are really that eager to go to war with us.

  “So no, I don’t suppose England is the answer. I have a different theory. I think the poisoning of your soul took place much more recently. I think it had less to do with faith, or politics, than with a woman.

  “Tell me I’m wrong, Dr. Costello. Tell me this isn’t about your fiancée.”

  Costello’s smile went away. But he was looking at Mustafa now.

  “Jessica Lamar, of Texas,” Mustafa said, acknowledging the eye contact. “She was working as a physical rehabilitation specialist in Jaffa when you did your residency. Is that how you met, through work? Did you share a patient? Or did you meet at a chapel service? She was a member of the United Methodist sect, which I understand is another branch of Anglicanism, so that would mean you could worship together, yes?” Costello didn’t answer and after a moment Mustafa went on: “You applied for a marriage license in spring of 2005. By then you’d already been accepted onto the staff at Karkh General, so I guess the plan was you’d get married over the summer and move to Baghdad to start work in the fall. But in early June, you got a call from the police.

  “She was visiting outpatients in Gaza City. Gaza . . . not the nicest part of Palestine. But because it’s so poor, plenty of residents join the military in hopes of escaping to a better life—and now, thanks to the war, there are plenty of injured veterans needing care. So your fiancée was on a mission of mercy to help soldiers wounded in the invasion of your native country . . . and her reward for this was to be shot down senselessly by a couple of petty thieves.”

  A muscle started jumping in Costello’s cheek.

  “According to the Gaza PD,” Mustafa continued, “the gunmen were members of a street gang that calls itself the Islamic Resistance Movement. You know the joke the Gaza City cops tell about the IRM, Dr. Costello? They say the Movement is very successful—it’s been resisting Islam’s message of peace for over thirty years now.”

  Mustafa placed a hand on the case folder. “The police report of your fiancée’s murder is in here,” he said. “There’s a picture. Would you like to see it?” Costello blinked and his head jerked back. “No, I don’t suppose you would . . . But there’s another photo I would like you to take a look at.” As Costello eyed him warily, Mustafa got out his wallet and removed a worn snapshot that had been laminated in plastic. He placed it on the table and slid it forward, watching the doctor as he did so and seeing, in his mind’s eye, the mother from the Ghost Music store.

  “I don’t know this woman,” Costello said.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” said Mustafa. “Her name was Fadwa bint Harith. She was my wife. On the morning the towers fell, we had an argument. I was at fault, and knew it, and so naturally I was very angry. When I had to leave for work and my car wouldn’t start, I took hers. She had an appointment downtown as well that morning, not far from where I was going, but rather than drive her I left her to take the subway. She would have been riding on the number two line, one of the trains that passed beneath the Tigris and Euphrates Plaza.

  “You can guess how the story ends, Dr. Costello. And perhaps you wouldn’t think it presumptuous if I said that I thought I understood something of how you felt, losing your Jessica. But really, that’s too simple. We have this thing in common, you and I, but there are also differences.

  “One difference,” Mustafa said, placing his hand on the folder again, “is that there is no photo of my wife’s body for me to be afraid of. Fadwa is one of the 11/9 missing. I know she is dead—indeed, I would say I knew it even before it happened—but there is no actual proof of that.

  “Now, I don’t know how much you know about Islamic legal tradition, Dr. Costello. In the matter of missing persons, the authorities vary widely in how long you must wait before declaring them dead. The strictest standard, from the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, holds that in the absence of positive proof you must assume the person is alive until such time as they would die of old age. In the case of a young person vanishing, that can mean a wait of as much as sixty or seventy years. It’s a very strict standard, especially for women, who can only have one husband at a time.

  “Here in the state of Iraq, we follow the much more liberal standard of the Maliki school, which specifies a waiting period of only four years. But there’s a catch: The four-year clock doesn’t start until you go before a judge to report the person missing.

  “In Fadwa’s case, I resisted going to the judge. I knew she was dead, I didn’t doubt it, but still, out of some selfish impulse, I delayed. Fadwa’s father was very angry with me when he found out—he accused me of being cowardly. Eventually, my own father convinced me to do the right thing. But because I delayed so long, it’s only very recently that the official declaration of death came through. That was hard; I was surprised by how hard it was, after so much time. My behavior since then has been . . . erratic. My boss, he’s actually worried about my sanity.

  “What about you, Dr. Costello? Did having your fiancée’s body make it easier or harder for you, do you think? I can’t imagine it was much easier. Did you go mad? I think perhaps you did. And I am tempted, again, to say that I understand.

  “But that brings us to the other difference between us.”

  Mustafa flipped open the folder and pulled out not just one death-scene photograph, but several. He began dealing these onto the table, and Costello, who had been listening attentively, now recoiled in his seat as if Mustafa were chucking hot coals at him.

  “Take a good look, doctor,” Mustafa said. Costello tried not to, but before he could avert his eyes one of the images caught at him, and he looked; and then his expression changed, as he realized that the people in these pictures, though unquestionably murder victims, were not, any of them, his fiancée. They were Arabs, Iraqis: two men, dead in the front seat of a bullet-riddled car; another man, tied to a post with his hands behind his back and shot in the head; a woman, garroted in her bedroom; and saddest of all, three small children, lying like dolls in the wreckage of a blown-up storefront.

  “Yes, take a good look,” Mustafa repeated. “This is what you signed on for, when you joined the Hoffmans.” This wasn’t, strictly speaking, true. Mustafa had taken these photos from an open case file forwarded to AHS from Halal Enforcement. Although the use of explosives automatically made it a terrorism case under post-11/9 rules, these were almost certainly organized crime slayings. The killers would be Arabs as well, their boss—Mustafa could guess who he was—a Muslim. Still, the goal of these murders was the same as those planned by the Hoffmans: to spread terror. Morally, there was no difference.

  “Let me tell you something about myself, Dr. Costello,” Mustafa said. “I’m no pacifist. I’m not above thoughts of vengeance. If the men who flew the planes on 11/9 were brought alive before me, I’d show them no mercy. Likewise, with the men who sent them on their way. But this”—he waved a hand at the pictures—“this slaughter of innocents, it’s beyond me. Not even in my darkest dreams am I tempted to such savagery. I look at this woman, here, and all I can think of is Fadwa in her last moments. God willing she didn’t suffer long, but to imagine even an instant of her pain and fear, and then to imagine choosing to inflict that same pain and fear on some other blameless woman . . . No. No, that is beyond me. And these children, little children who can have done nothing, nothing to deserve this . . . I don’t understand it. Can you explain it to me, Dr. Costello?

  “Is this Christianity? I’m no expert on your New Testament, but I have read parts of it. The prophet Jesus, peace be unto him, said that there were
two great commandments: to love God with all your heart and soul, and to love your neighbor as yourself. True words, Dr. Costello, words that any Muslim would be bound to agree with, for we believe the same thing. But even a very poor Muslim such as I am would have a hard time seeing how you get from those words, to this. Can you explain it to me? Think of your Jessica, in her last moments. If she were here now, and knew what sort of acts you’d been contemplating, what would she say?”

  Costello’s lips moved in a soft murmur.

  “What was that, Dr. Costello? I didn’t quite hear you.”

  “I said, I’m sorry.”

  “I would like to believe that,” Mustafa said. “It would help me to believe that, if you’d talk to me about your dealings with the Hoffmans: What you were planning. Who else was involved. Anything you can tell me that might prevent the deaths of more innocents.”

  But Costello shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “To the contrary, Dr. Costello, it matters very much. Certainly it matters to those who may die. It matters to their families. It matters to me. And as a human being and a child of God, it should matter to you. I won’t lie to you: Even if you choose to cooperate fully, you’re facing a long stretch in prison. For security reasons you’ll be kept in solitary confinement, which means years in a small room with only your own conscience for company. You may not think it now, but over time, over long time, guilt and regret can eat you alive. And if that doesn’t happen? You still have to answer to God on Judgment Day. So I would urge you, for your own sake, to care. Care now, while you can still do some good.”

  Not a bad speech, Mustafa thought, but even before he finished, he could tell that it was wasted. Whatever brief connection he’d established with Costello had already evaporated. The doctor had mentally withdrawn, or maybe sidestepped was a better word—when he spoke again, it was from a different, and very strange, place.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Costello said, “because none of this is real.”

  “What’s not real, Dr. Costello?”

  “This world.”

  “The world isn’t real?”

  “This world.” Costello tried to spread his arms in an all-encompassing gesture, but, restrained by the cuffs, had to settle for flapping his hands. “This country.”

  “I’m not following you, Dr. Costello.”

  “The ‘United Arab States.’ It’s not real.”

  “You’re saying you don’t recognize the authority of the UAS government?”

  “No, I’m saying it doesn’t exist. It’s a mirage. There is no Arab superpower, no union of Arab states. In the real world, you’re just a bunch of backward third-world countries that no one would even care about except for oil . . .”

  “Dr. Costello, what are you—”

  “It’s a mirage! All of it: This country. This world. Everything you think you know, about what is, is just an illusion. A dream.” He paused, stymied momentarily by Mustafa’s incredulous expression, but then pushed on. “America. America is the true superpower.”

  “America,” Mustafa said. “Really.”

  “I don’t expect you to believe me—”

  “That’s good, Dr. Costello, because I don’t. I don’t know what sort of game you think you’re playing at here, but if you want to talk about what’s real, then I’ll tell you, my superiors—the men in charge of deciding your fate—they really don’t have a sense of humor when it comes to terrorism. So if you’ve got some half-baked notion of pleading insanity—”

  “I’m not crazy,” Costello said. “I’m not pleading anything. I accept my fate. I’m trapped in the mirage, as long as God sees fit to maintain it.”

  “This mirage you speak of, it’s God’s doing?”

  Costello nodded. “ ‘The last shall be first, and the first last . . .’ God’s turned the world upside down.”

  “And why would He do that?”

  “To punish us.”

  “The Americans?”

  “Yes.”

  “For what sin?”

  “Pride,” Costello said. “Failure to submit to His will. We turned away from Him, so He turned away from us. He sent the mirage, and put you people in charge.”

  “The Arabs are instruments of God’s wrath?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And those Gaza City thugs who killed your fiancée. They work for God too?”

  Costello was silent.

  “And if you believe that,” Mustafa pressed him, “why fight against us? How does that make sense, to terrorize God’s own agents?”

  “It’s not about you,” Costello said. “It’s about us. About demonstrating our faith.”

  “Through murder?”

  “I told you I was sorry.”

  “Dr. Costello—”

  “I’m sorry about your wife. I’m sorry you’re in pain. I mean that . . . But it doesn’t matter. You’d be in pain anyway. Your suffering isn’t part of the mirage. It’s just your lot.”

  “My lot.”

  “All of you,” Costello said. “You’re the losers. It’s not fair, but it’s how it is: God’s plan has winners and losers, and you’re the losers. You’re the losers. That’s reality . . . And we’ll kill as many of you as we have to, to get back there.”

  Listening to this, Mustafa was once again aware of the motion of the earth beneath his feet. He felt a tingle in his hands as his nails dug into his palms, and imagined a reality, quite close, in which he leaned across the table and began battering Costello with his fists.

  Just as well that Abdullah chose that moment to knock on the glass.

  “He’s not lying,” Abdullah said.

  “You mean this life really is just a dream?” said Samir. “Can I be rich when I wake up?”

  “Obviously the story is nonsense. But according to the machine, he believes what he’s saying.”

  “You pulled me out to tell me the man’s insane?” Mustafa said, still flushed with anger. “I knew that already, thanks.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Abdullah said. He jerked a thumb at Amal.

  “Umm Dabir just called down from Farouk’s office,” Amal explained. “She said Farouk’s on the phone with Riyadh. She said you told her to let you know the next time that happened during an interview.”

  “Riyadh’s calling now? About this guy?”

  “Umm Dabir didn’t say what the call was about. But if that’s what you were waiting for, I guess so.”

  Seven times over the past two years, Mustafa’s interrogation of a terror suspect had been interrupted by an official call from Riyadh ordering that the questioning cease immediately; in each case, senior AHS agents had arrived soon after to transfer the prisoner to a “special location.” For a long time, he’d thought little of it.

  Then about a month ago, he’d tried to do some follow-up on one of these special prisoners—a French smuggler named René Arceneau—and discovered that the files pertaining to his arrest had vanished. His name had been scrubbed from the computer databases, not just the AHS databases but all of them. ICE, the Bureau, Halal Enforcement’s Maghreb division, even the Algerian Department of Motor Vehicles, all parties to Arceneau’s capture, now claimed to have no record of him.

  This was unprecedented. Even in cases of extraordinary rendition, where prisoners were shipped overseas to be questioned in a human-rights vacuum like Texas, the Arab government didn’t deny that the prisoners were in custody, it merely lied about what was done to them. Mustafa wondered what would be bad enough to make the state destroy evidence of a person’s very existence.

  He also wondered why he cared so much. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t already known that “special location” was a euphemism for a torture facility. And once you assent to a person being drugged, starved, beaten, hung by the wrists, burned, frozen, choked, drowned, electrocuted, and kept in sensory deprivation until his mind breaks, why should it bother you to think that he might also be murdered, and once murdered, erased?

  Maybe it was the timi
ng. The day Mustafa learned that René Arceneau had become an unperson was the same day he’d gotten Fadwa’s death certificate.

  We close our eyes to sin, but God sees all.

  Mustafa’s subsequent attempt to learn more about Arceneau’s fate had uncovered only one additional piece of information: The order to have him removed to special custody had come not from AHS headquarters but from Congress, from the office of the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Mustafa learned this from Farouk, who’d warned him to stop rattling the knobs of doors he had no business opening.

  That the warning hadn’t taken proved beyond all doubt that Farouk was right to be worried about his sanity. Who’s more dangerous to wrestle with, a suicide bomber or a senator? Clearly the latter: A suicide bomber only has one way to destroy you.

  “Mustafa?” Amal said. “What’s going on?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Mustafa replied. “Who’s handling the search of Costello’s apartment?”

  “Sayyid and Abu Naji.”

  “Why don’t you and Samir hurry over there and help them?”

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” said Samir.

  “Please, just do it.” Mustafa held out his hand. “Can I borrow your cell phone while you’re gone?”

  “My cell phone . . .” Samir sighed and reached into his pocket. “And what about Amal’s cell phone, eh?”

  Amal, who still didn’t know what was going on here, but was smart enough to guess at a few details, said: “My battery charge is very low. I may have to leave the phone switched off to conserve power . . . What are you going to do, Mustafa?”