The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  “No! No, I . . . I don’t know what I was thinking. But this is important, Amal. I needed to see you.”

  “Well, here I am,” Amal said. “Now what is this about?”

  “It’s about our son.” He looked at her in sudden defiance, daring her to challenge him on his choice of pronoun. “Our son . . . He’s done something very foolish, something I can’t undo on my own.”

  “What has he done?”

  “I think he’s trying to follow in your footsteps.”

  “What does that . . . Anwar, you didn’t—”

  “No.” Anwar shook his head. “He knows nothing about you. He thinks Nasrin is his mother, and she, she loves him very much. But there must be something of you in his blood. From the time he first learned to talk, he’s wanted to do something exciting with his life, something dangerous. As a boy he would go on about how he was going to be a test pilot, or a deep-sea diver, or a police detective. Then, after November 9, he came up with a new career goal: soldier. On his thirteenth birthday, he told Nasrin and me how he was going to go to America to fight for his country, bring democracy and Islam to the Christians. We tried to talk him out of it. We told him if he really wanted to make the world a safer place, he should become a diplomat like his grandfather.” He smiled ruefully. “A hopeless argument . . . Nasrin and I consoled ourselves with the thought that the war would be over by the time Salim was old enough to enlist, and anyway he’d probably grow out of the idea. And he seemed to, or at least he stopped talking about it.

  “Then last year he turned eighteen and left for college. I was so proud when he chose U of L, it never occurred to me the real reason he wanted to go to Beirut was because the Marine training center is there. The friend who was supposed to be Salim’s roommate played along, taking phone messages and forwarding his emails, so we wouldn’t realize he was at boot camp. Nasrin did get suspicious when Salim came home for winter break—he’d lost weight, and his hair was very short—but he told her he’d joined the wrestling team. Then in May, after he’d finished his advanced training and was about to deploy, he sent us this letter . . .” He drew two wrinkled sheets of paper from his suit jacket. “You should read it,” he said, setting the letter on the table, but Amal made no move to take it. “Salim apologizes for misleading me and for not being the person I wanted him to be.” Anwar looked at her. “His choice of words is . . . very familiar.”

  Amal closed her eyes. “Anwar,” she said, “I am sorry if my blood caused your son to act against your wishes. But I don’t see—”

  “Salim is in Washington now. Posted to the Green Zone. They say it’s relatively safe there, but no place in America is truly safe. Not for a Muslim boy who craves excitement.”

  “What is it you want from me, Anwar? What is it you think I can do?”

  “Get Salim transferred back to Arabia, of course.”

  “How?”

  “Your mother is a senator.”

  “My mother!” Amal laughed. “Do you know what my mother will say if I tell her you came to see me?”

  “You don’t have to mention me at all. Ask her to do this as a favor to you. It’s a small thing.”

  “Why don’t you ask your father, then? Surely an ex-diplomat has friends who can do such favors.”

  “I did ask him,” Anwar told her. “And he is trying, but his friends all supported the invasion, and those who still have influence are worried about the appearance of hypocrisy . . .”

  “Maybe they should be worried about that,” Amal said.

  Anwar’s face reddened. “How can you be so selfish?”

  “Selfish? Do not speak to me of selfishness!”

  “I know what you think of me, Amal,” Anwar said. “You think that when I insisted you give birth to Salim, it was because I thought it would make you stay with me. Well, you are right: At the time, I did think that. But that wasn’t my only reason. I believed then, as I know now, that Salim was a human soul who deserved to be born for his own sake . . .”

  “An easy thing for a man to say.”

  “An easy thing for a father to say,” Anwar countered. “Salim is a good boy, Amal. I have tried to be a good father to him. You don’t know, I’ve made sacrifices . . . And I would do it all again, and more if I could . . .

  “I don’t ask you to feel the same way,” he continued. “Regard Salim as the stranger he is to you. A stranger’s life is still worth protecting. Isn’t that what you do in Homeland Security, save the lives of people you don’t even know? Do that, then. Save one more.”

  “And if I can’t?” Amal said. “Or won’t?”

  “Then peace be unto you,” Anwar replied. “If your answer is no, I’ll go my way and trouble you no more. Perhaps my father can still do something . . . But please, Amal. In God’s name, I beg of you, don’t just say no. Look into your heart first. God willing, you’ll find some mercy there. A little mercy for our child, that’s all I ask.”

  He stood abruptly, trembling on the verge of tears, and walked away, barreling past a waiter who was just then coming to check on them. The breeze of his sudden departure lifted the pages of the letter that he had left behind on the table. Seeing this, Amal started to call him back, but he was already at the door and anyway she thought better of it. She watched him go out, watched through the restaurant window as he marched off, head bowed, back the way he had come.

  “Ma’am?” The waiter, a Pashtun, stood beside the table with his hands folded, looking embarrassed for her.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “Can you get me some coffee?”

  “Of course . . .” Amal watched him hurry away too.

  Then she picked up Salim’s letter and began to read.

  THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA

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  The young woman sat before the imam with her head bowed. “My uncle is no longer my uncle,” she said. “He stays out all night at jazz clubs, gambling and drinking alcohol. He is cruel to my aunt—he won’t go to the mosque anymore, and mocks her when she does. He’s stopped praying . . .”

  “Sadly, what you describe is not unfamiliar to me,” the imam said. “These days, all too many children of Islam have been seduced by the modern world.”

  “No!” The woman looked up suddenly, eyes wide. “No, you don’t understand! My uncle would never abandon his faith!”

  “But . . .”

  “The man living in our house, pretending to be my uncle, is not my uncle. He’s someone else. Perhaps . . . some thing else.”

  Poor doomed girl, Samir thought, as this scene played out on the break room TV. By the time the imam next saw her, she’d be a pod person, worldly and soulless, her chaste headscarf exchanged for a decadent ’50s hairstyle. The imam would fare little better: Locked in the muezzin’s tower of his own mosque, fighting sleep, he’d leap to his death rather than be turned. And so it would be left to the imam’s son—a dissolute jazz saxophonist, played by an improbably young Omar Sharif—to defeat the alien menace. Returning to his faith in the last reel, he’d load up a truck with explosives and drive through the gates of the dockside warehouse from which the invaders were preparing to infect all Arabia.

  Samir could remember staying up late to watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers with his father when he was just six years old. He’d huddled close to his father’s side and covered his face during the scary parts, then cheered as the tide turned against the invaders. Good times.

  The film had been remade in color in the late 1970s, with the Israeli actor Leonard Nimoy playing the part of the doomed imam. The remake had
attracted controversy for its more explicit sexuality—which made the “worldliness” of the original Body Snatchers’ pod people seem quaint—and also for its more pessimistic ending. In the new Body Snatchers, the attempt to stop the invaders failed. The closing shot showed the imam’s son marching in a crowd, emitting the characteristic shriek of a pod convert. The implication, that aliens could actually conquer Islam—that God would allow that—struck a number of real-life imams and sheikhs as blasphemous. There were calls to ban the film and demonstrations outside some theaters that showed it.

  Samir caught the remake several years later, at a midnight showing on the BU campus. He didn’t care for it. By then he was struggling with his own alien invasion—physical and emotional impulses that he’d long been aware of, but could no longer deny. The movie’s theme cut too close to home, and the downbeat ending upset him as much as it had the clerics.

  He still loved the old black-and-white version, though.

  Abdullah came in the break room in search of coffee just as Omar Sharif was preparing his final assault on the invaders’ warehouse stronghold. “Hard at work, I see.”

  Samir held up his cell phone. “I’m waiting on a call from an informant.”

  “Uh-huh.” On screen, Sharif finished wiring up the explosives in the back of the truck and got behind the wheel. “Wow,” Abdullah said. “Talk about a movie that plays differently now.”

  “Nah, Sharif’s a good guy,” Samir said. “And he’s no suicide bomber.”

  “Are you sure? I thought he sacrificed himself to kill the aliens.”

  “No, he jumps out of the truck at the last second. Here, watch . . .”

  The truck crashed through a barricade and accelerated along a pier towards the warehouse. Then the film hit a splice and they were looking at a long shot of the warehouse blowing up.

  “Wait a minute,” Samir said.

  Abdullah laughed. “Edited for television.”

  “No, that’s not right. It must be a defective copy or something. Just wait—he’s in the water, and he comes out of the surf and Faten Hamama is waiting for him . . .”

  It didn’t happen. The destruction of the warehouse went on and on, the same explosions looping several times while martial music played, and then the words THE END appeared.

  “That’s not right,” Samir said. “Omar Sharif survives. He gets the girl!”

  “Yeah, well.” Abdullah shrugged. “It’s just a movie, dude.”

  “But that isn’t how it ends!”

  His cell phone rang.

  Abdullah, in no hurry to get back to whatever task was keeping him here after dark, followed Samir to the elevators. “So you’re going to meet with the guy?”

  “What guy?” Samir said.

  “Your informant.”

  “Ah. No. Turns out it was a waste of time. He just called to say he couldn’t find out what I needed.”

  “Well if you’re not busy then, you want to go grab some dinner? Or maybe”—Abdullah looked hopeful—“hit a club? I’m supposed to be babysitting a wiretap, but now that Farouk’s gone home I was thinking I’d put the machines on automatic for a few hours.”

  “You know I’d love to,” said Samir. “But I’m actually not feeling too well. I’m going to go home and get to bed early for once.”

  Samir’s “informant” was actually Isaac, his former colleague from Halal Enforcement. Isaac was still at Halal; these days he headed a task force that was conducting a probe of the Baghdad PD’s vice division. Between his monitoring of the vice squad’s activities and his knowledge of Halal’s own operations, Isaac was able to predict with near-perfect accuracy which of Baghdad’s rat cellars, brothels, and other illegal establishments were liable to be raided on any given night. Earlier today Samir had forwarded his old friend an email joke—their prearranged signal that he was planning to go out. Once Isaac had the night’s vice raid schedule, he went to a pay phone, called Samir’s cell, and, without identifying himself, recited a list of target neighborhoods to avoid. Isaac did not ask, and Samir did not tell, what sort of illicit entertainment he’d be seeking. But Samir was pretty sure Abdullah wouldn’t be into it.

  He drove home to the Kadhimiyah district apartment where he’d been living ever since his divorce. He showered and changed clothes, then pulled all of the ID out of his wallet, lingering for a moment over a snapshot of his twin sons, Malik and Jibril. The boys, ten years old now, lived with their mother in Basra.

  Samir left the snapshot with the pile of his ID and grabbed a driver’s license with a fake name. The phony license was primarily a good luck charm—if he got into trouble tonight, the thing most likely to get him out was cash. He made sure he had plenty of that, too.

  He slipped out of the apartment building through the back door, walked to a Baghdad Transit stop several blocks away, and caught a bus across the river. At Antar Square in Adhamiyah he switched to the subway. Descending into the station he glimpsed a funhouse reflection of himself in a security mirror. Past the turnstile, the darkened glass of a smoke shop presented him with another reflection; though less distorted than the first, the image still seemed like that of a stranger. It was the way he was carrying himself, he knew: Along with his identification, Samir had left behind his usual swagger.

  He boarded a southeast-bound number 6 train, choosing a car whose only other occupant was a long-haired BU student reading a biology textbook. Samir sat across from him and waited, smiling, to see if he’d make eye contact. But the boy only burrowed deeper into his book.

  The door at the far end of the subway car slid open and a transit cop entered. As he came down the car, rapping his nightstick against the empty seats, Samir straightened up and put on his day-face for a moment. The cop gave him a look but walked past without saying anything.

  At the Muadham Gate station three men boarded the train together, all wearing the black uniform of the Mahdi Army’s Guardian Angel street patrol. The transit cop, making another pass through the car, pulled up short and raised his nightstick; but when all three Angels turned towards him, he reconsidered his options and stepped off onto the platform just as the train doors were closing. Samir, not quick enough to disembark, instead stood up and moved to the next car. Looking back, he saw the Angels approach the long-haired student, one of them reaching out to flick the locks brushing his collar.

  Two stops later, the conductor announced the transfer point for the Sadr City El. When the subway got underway again, Samir took another look back into the adjoining car. The Angels and the student were gone, but the textbook lay on the floor, broken-spined. Samir watched it shuddering with the motion of the train.

  He might have become a sailor if he weren’t so afraid of drowning.

  Samir’s Uncle Zuhair—actually a cousin of his father’s—had been in the merchant navy. No one ever called him Sinbad, but like David Cohen he was a handsome man, so it was something of a curiosity that he never married. Whenever he was asked about this, Uncle Zuhair would say that he was married—to the sea. If the questioner was male, he might add a ribald joke about the hundreds of “ports” he had visited in his career.

  Even now, knowing firsthand how far a man will go to hide his true nature, Samir had a hard time believing that his uncle was anything but an itinerant heterosexual who happened to love the smell of salt air. It would have been a fantastic cover. But Samir’s sole experience with deepwater travel, during a high school field trip to Kuwait City, had been a nightmare: The tour boat that was taking the class out to Failaka Island had gotten caught in a storm, and with the waters too rough for safe docking, they’d been forced to ride it out. Samir had thought for sure they would capsize, and when they finally made it back to port he swore he would never go through that again.

  If he couldn’t share Uncle Zuhair’s profession, he could still adopt other aspects of his lifestyle. For most of his youth, Samir had been overweight, but towards the end of high school he began to work out, and his new physique, along with the rough sense
of humor he had developed as a defense mechanism, proved attractive to a certain kind of girl. At BU, Samir cultivated a reputation as a ladies’ man. It wasn’t a complete charade, but he routinely exaggerated his exploits, at times recklessly endangering the reputations of the women involved. He felt bad about that, but he was terrified and desperate to hide what he was—at first from himself, and then later, when self-denial became impossible, from his friends and his family.

  For a while he lived two lives, in two separate worlds. He knew he couldn’t go on playing a womanizer forever: As a man of the land, not the sea, he was expected to get married. The prospect wasn’t entirely unpleasant. He liked kids and thought he’d make a good father. As for the husband part of it, well, the movies and soap operas he relied on for advice in this matter all suggested that a good wife could work miracles of transformation. Samir doubted that even a great wife could make him truly enthusiastic about women, but he hoped that she could at least curb his lust for men.

  In his senior year he got engaged to a fellow student, a chemistry major named Sabirah. Their betrothal, rather than magically curing him of his vice, only made it worse: As the wedding date neared, Samir began acting like a glutton taking his last pass through an all-you-can-eat buffet. When Sabirah confronted him about the fact that he was never home at night when she called him, he lied, confessing that he’d been seeing other women. He begged for another chance, but his lack of conviction was evident and Sabirah broke it off with him.

  He tried again a couple of years later with Asriyah, a Halal switchboard operator. Asriyah, while perhaps not as smart as Sabirah, was a good deal more perceptive, and guessed the truth about Samir’s infidelities. She could have ruined him but chose to be merciful, supporting his public explanation of their breakup.

  After two spoiled engagements Samir had a new reputation, one that made it much easier to remain unmarried without raising suspicion. Sometimes friends and relatives would take pity on him and try to fix him up with women who, for various reasons, couldn’t afford to be choosy about their prospects, but through a practiced obnoxiousness, Samir managed to keep even these women at bay.