The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  Mustafa nodded at the suitcase in the chair to Samir’s right. “Is that from your trip to Basra, or are you going someplace else?”

  “Keeping my options open,” Samir said. “When I got home this morning, someone had been in my apartment. I was going to make myself a snack and noticed a thumbprint on the refrigerator door. Lost my appetite . . . So I threw some things together and got out.”

  “Where would you go? To be with Najat?”

  “No, I don’t know where she is going. It’s better that way. I don’t expect to see her again.” His voice hitched. “Or Malik and Jibril . . . I was thinking I might go to Greece.”

  “What’s in Greece?”

  “A chance I was too cowardly to take.” He smiled sadly. “I’m still too cowardly, really. Really what will happen, I’ll slink around Baghdad for a couple of days until Idris catches up to me. Then my troubles will be over.” He sighed. “Mustafa, I’ve got something to tell you . . .”

  “Before you do,” said Mustafa, “I’ve got something to ask you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Are you still my friend?”

  “Not a very good one I suppose.”

  “The same could be said of me, the reckless way I’ve been acting,” Mustafa pointed out. “And you did save me from being burned alive by that Minuteman.”

  Samir shook his head. “That doesn’t count. You and I were supposed to be dead already, along with everyone else in the convoy.”

  “But we didn’t die. God gave us another chance—and you made good use of yours. Now I would like to do the same. Tell me you’re my friend and I can trust you, and whatever happened in America—whatever Idris forced you to do—it’s behind us. Forgotten.”

  “Just like that, huh?” Samir barked a laugh, but then his throat hitched again and he began to cry. His shoulders shook as he wept, all the fear and shame that had been weighing on him releasing in a torrent. Mustafa took his hand and held it.

  “Fuck, man,” Samir said, when the storm had passed. He swiped water from his eyes, wincing as the heel of his palm pressed the bruise. “You know God didn’t really give us another chance, don’t you? Just a little reprieve. Idris is going to kill us both, Amal too probably.”

  “God willing, that is possible,” Mustafa conceded. “But I choose to be optimistic.”

  “Remember what we were just saying about you being an idiot?”

  “Yes,” Mustafa said smiling. “Your idiot friend.”

  They were both laughing a few minutes later when Amal came in the tea shop. She approached the table slowly and asked Mustafa: “Do you need more time?”

  “No.” He gave Samir’s hand a last squeeze. “We are good.”

  “Good.” Amal nodded to Samir, noting the bruise but not saying anything about it. She sat down. “The coast looks clear outside. Or at least, if Al Qaeda is following us, they’re doing a good job hiding the surveillance.”

  “We shall have to trust to God about that too,” Mustafa said. “Now, speaking of Al Qaeda: Tell Samir what you told me, about Osama bin Laden.”

  The noon prayer had just ended and men and women were coming out of a mosque adjacent to Zawra Park, exchanging the blessing of peace as they headed off to lunch or back to work. Joe Simeon watched them from the back of an air-conditioned cab. He wiped condensation off the window to get a clearer view and stared at the mosque’s entrance, wondering what it was like inside. Would they have stained glass, like a real church?

  The cabbie mistook the nature of his interest: “You are Muslim?”

  “What?” said Joe Simeon. “No. I’m a Christian.” So there was no ambiguity: “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

  “Christian, I thought so,” the cabbie said nodding. “American?”

  “Originally.”

  “ ‘Originally,’ ” the cabbie repeated slowly, the word not in his lexicon. “This is your hometown, Originally?”

  “Yeah,” Joe Simeon said. “Originally, New York. It’s just outside Manhattan.”

  “Manhattan I have heard of.” The cabbie nodded again. “You know, the Muslims of Baghdad, we pray for the Christians of America, of Manhattan. Now that the war is over—now that you are free—we have very high hopes for you. That you will become, what is the word? Civilized!”

  “Like the Arabs, you mean.” The crusader’s expression soured. “You really think we’re going to turn into you?”

  “With God’s blessing, even the greatest miracle is but a trifle,” the cabbie said pleasantly. “You’ll see, my brother!”

  Traffic began to back up as they got closer to Ground Zero. While Joe Simeon tracked their progress on his map, the cabbie switched on the radio, tuning in a flurry of Arabic that apparently constituted a weather report. “Shamal,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Sandstorm.”

  Joe Simeon wiped off his window again. The sky overhead was blue and clear.

  The cabbie chuckled. “Not yet. But it’s coming.”

  “When?” A sandstorm, if it was anything like the movies, could disrupt the rally and screw up the plan. On the other hand, like the inside of a mosque, it’d be an interesting thing to see.

  “A couple of hours,” the cabbie said.

  He’d miss it, then. Or on second thought, maybe he wouldn’t—maybe he’d already be looking down when it happened. “OK,” Joe Simeon said. “Let me off at this next corner, here.”

  “Are you sure? I can get you closer.”

  “No, that’s all right, I’ll walk from here. I don’t want to be late.”

  “According to Donald Rumsfeld,” Amal said, “in the real world Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization and Osama bin Laden is responsible for the September 11 attacks.”

  “This is what Bin Laden has been trying to cover up?” Samir said. “The Americans think he did to them what they did to us?”

  “I suppose it might be a political liability, if anyone in Arabia could be made to believe it.” Amal smiled. “Imagine the push-poll questions: ‘Would you be more or less likely to vote for Senator Bin Laden if you knew he had an evil twin?’ ”

  “Not a twin,” said Mustafa. “The same man with a different history. Or the same history remembered differently.”

  “Would it really be a liability, though?” Samir asked. “Suppose he did kill a bunch of Americans in some other reality. So what? In this reality, which is the only one most people care about, the Christians attacked us.”

  “That is the official story,” Mustafa said. “And given the bloodthirstiness of some Christians, it might well be true. But remember a key element of the mirage legend: America is the real superpower, while the individual states of Arabia are just that, independent nations. Weak ones. When a weak state is drawn into a fight with a superpower, what happens to it?”

  Samir shrugged. “It gets its ass kicked.”

  Mustafa looked at Amal. “What did Rumsfeld say America did, in response to 9/11?”

  “Invaded Iraq,” she said. “His story about what happened to the Hussein family was heartwarming, but when I asked what the war did to the rest of us he pretended not to understand the question.”

  “Wait,” said Samir. “So you’re saying that in this alternate reality of Rumsfeld’s, Osama bin Laden is an Iraqi?”

  “No, he’s still from Jeddah,” Amal said. “A ‘Saudi’ Arabian.”

  “Then why the hell would America invade Iraq?”

  “Because God put a Texan in charge,” Mustafa said. “The point I am getting at is this: A terrorist who attacks a Christian superpower in the name of Islam knows he is setting up his fellow Muslims for slaughter, because that is how superpowers react when they are struck. Which raises the question: If in one version of history, a man is willing to murder thousands of innocent Muslims by proxy, is it not plausible that in another version, he might be willing to commit the same sin more directly?”

  “So we’re to become Truthers, now?” Amal said. “You think Osama bin L
aden is responsible for the 11/9 attacks as well?”

  “That is what I am suggesting.”

  “But the November 9 hijackers were Christians. That’s documented—I don’t care what the conspiracy theorists say. And Al Qaeda won’t even recruit Shia Muslims, so how—”

  “Oh God,” said Samir.

  Amal looked at him. “What?”

  “There are Christians in Al Qaeda. Or at least people pretending to be Christian . . .”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The ambush on our convoy in Fairfax County,” Mustafa explained. “Al Qaeda was behind that.”

  “No, that was Rumsfeld’s militia. I told you, he admitted to it. And Rumsfeld was not Osama bin Laden’s ally.”

  “That does not preclude him from being Osama bin Laden’s stooge. If anything, his fear and hatred of Al Qaeda would have made him easier to manipulate.”

  “To what end, though?” Amal said. “Why would Osama bin Laden want to provoke a war between Arabia and America, or between Islam and Christendom? What would he be hoping to accomplish?”

  “I think,” said Mustafa, “that he wants to turn the clock back. Undo modernity and the Republic, and usher in a new Caliphate.” He brought out the CIA report David Koresh had given him and laid it on the table. Then he continued: “Imagine you are Osama bin Laden. A son of privilege, heir to one of the wealthiest men in Arabia. Like many a rich kid before you, though, you’re not content to thank God for your blessings. You become disaffected, contemptuous of what you see as a decadent society and a corrupt political culture.

  “Eventually you drop out, go to Peshawar and then Afghanistan. The harsh life of a holy warrior suits you, and your experiences on the battlefield lead you to a dark epiphany. The people of Afghanistan have never lacked for hardship and their suffering has only multiplied under the Russians, yet despite or perhaps because of this, the men you fight alongside practice what seems to you a much purer form of Islam, untainted by latter-day heresy. At some point you ask yourself what a dose of the same suffering might do for the state of the faith in your own country.

  “Of course you can’t turn Arabia into Afghanistan. But perhaps you don’t need to. Modern living has made your countrymen so soft, maybe a hard shock to the system is all it would take to herd them back onto the righteous path. God willing, anything is possible; and if there’s one thing being a holy warrior has convinced you of, it’s that you know the will of God.

  “So you go home, a hero. You pretend to make peace with the political elite of Riyadh, let them help you into a position of power. Behind the scenes you assemble Al Qaeda, the foundation of a new world order. You send scouts into Christendom to find the crusaders who will serve as your pawns, to make unprovoked war against Islam.

  “And so November 9, 2001: The plan is set in motion and succeeds beyond your wildest dreams. Three planes out of four reach their targets. The carnage is spectacular. Even the downing of the fourth plane—the one you’d hoped would kill the young Saudi president—turns out to be a blessing. That same president, horrified by the destruction and his own close brush with death, declares a jihad against terrorism—the holy war you wanted, and then some. Political opinion tilts sharply towards the Party of God. Citizens return to the mosques in droves. God’s will, as you’ve conceived it, is about to be made manifest.

  “And then, somehow,” said Mustafa, “it starts to unravel. The Republic trembles but does not fall. As the shock of 11/9 recedes, doubts are raised about the wisdom of some of the president’s actions. And it’s not just the die-hard secularists in the Unity Party asking questions. As the occupation drags on, as word of certain abuses is leaked to the press, fatwas are issued from some surprising quarters: fatwas condemning torture, condemning the erosion of civil liberties, condemning the persecution of Christians—condemning, even, the attack on America.

  “To you, for whom devotion to God and devotion to liberal democracy are mutually exclusive, this must all be very baffling. Clearly the rot goes deeper than you realized. More shocks are needed. Fortunately the crusaders are ready to provide them. The Americans are spoiling for vengeance and the Europeans are happy to help. You don’t even have to do anything, just sit back and watch them converge on Baghdad with their bombs and their scriptures. But the guardians of the homeland are alerted now, and a lot of these would-be martyrs are captured and interrogated. And they tell a very strange story.

  “As head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you are one of the first people in Arabia to learn about this peculiar legend the crusaders have latched on to. The parallels between the mythical September 11 and the real November 9 are alarming, to say the least. Some of these people are naming you as the architect of the attack, and even though they’re talking about a different attack, even though they’re madmen, that doesn’t mean your secret won’t be exposed.

  “You need to bury this story. You put Al Qaeda on alert and start monitoring interrogation sessions. Crusaders who say the wrong thing are made to disappear, along with whatever artifacts they possess. In the course of this cover-up you become an expert on the mirage legend, and the more you learn the more familiar it all seems, like something from a half-remembered dream.

  “Another world. A world in which America is the invading superpower, defiling the holy places of Islam. A world in which Arabia is broken up into minor principalities, in which men like Saddam Hussein and Muammar al Gaddafi are not just criminals or the butts of jokes but heads of state. A world in which the suffering of ordinary Arabs is, correspondingly, multiplied.

  “It’s your turn to be shocked. You realize, if this is true, you’ve been wasting your time, struggling inside an illusion, while the situation you were trying to create already existed. All you have to figure out is how to restore it.

  “And so, very late in the day, you have a new mission. It’s the same mission the crusaders are on, which ought to be ironic but really just makes sense, since in your pride, you’ve invited the same person to come whisper in your ear. In any case, that is your wish: To return to a world of sorrow, to an Arabia whose people will be ripe to receive your message, the word of God the All-Merciful and Compassionate as interpreted by the mass murderer Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden.”

  Mustafa paused and drank some tea. Samir was staring at him uneasily, and Amal had picked up the CIA report and was flipping through it.

  “It’s an interesting story,” Amal said good-naturedly. “But even with this”—she dropped the report back on the table—“you know no one is going to believe it.”

  “No,” Samir agreed. “If you go to the president talking like that, he’s going to think you’re nuts.”

  “Oh,” said Mustafa, “but I haven’t even told you the crazy part yet . . . Here. Let me show you a photograph.”

  Uday Hussein had come upstairs in pursuit of a maid. He’d been stalking her on and off since she’d started work at the Adhamiyah estate, following her through the house each time he caught sight of her, each time letting her elude him, confident that he could corner her whenever he wished. Today though he’d grown tired of the game and determined to end it, and so he was very annoyed when he burst into a bathroom where he was sure she was hiding, only to find it unoccupied.

  He backed out into the hall, turning towards a gallery that overlooked the domed chamber containing the Nebuchadnezzar statue. A male servant was polishing the balustrade; sensing Uday’s attention upon him, he recalled another chore in a distant part of the house and hastened away.

  Uday went the other direction, poking his head into rooms at random. In the westernmost part of the hall he paused in front of a massive wooden door banded in iron. The chamber beyond was off-limits but Uday decided to check it anyway, reasoning that if the maid were inside he’d have an excuse to punish her—not that he needed an excuse.

  The door somewhat surprisingly was unlocked. Uday leaned into it and swung it wide, then spread his arms and cried “Aha!” No one tried to bolt
past him. He lowered his arms again and stood just inside the threshold looking around.

  The chamber was octagonal, ten meters wide. In the past it had been used as both a prayer room and an astronomical observatory, and its single broad window was oriented towards the Qibla. Its current focus, however, was neither Mecca nor the heavens, but the heart of the vast desert in the Arabian Peninsula’s southeast quadrant. Sand from that desert had been poured in a series of curving lines on the chamber floor, forming a pattern like a whirlwind viewed from above. In the whirlwind’s eye the brass bottle from Al Hillah had been placed atop a mound of sand, its unstoppered mouth tilted towards the window. Incense burners and stands of bells and chimes were spaced around the whirlwind’s outer edge, and other trinkets and talismans had been arranged within the swirls of sand according to some system Uday had not been schooled in.

  The sight of it made him dizzy, and being dizzy made him angry. He approached the near edge of the whirlwind and nudged one of the smoking braziers with the toe of his boot.

  “Do not disturb the pattern!”

  Mr. Rammal, his father’s sorcerer, stood in the doorway holding a set of iron shackles. Uday clenched his fists at the rebuke and for a dangerous second contemplated stomping through the whole design like a boy kicking apart a sand castle—and then maybe, for an encore, pistol-whipping Mr. Rammal until his brains came out his ears.

  He resisted the urge. His father was home and not far away, and maids weren’t the only ones in this house subject to cruel punishments.

  Instead he glared at Mr. Rammal. “Who do you think you are talking to that way?”

  “You mustn’t disturb it,” Mr. Rammal repeated. He came forward to make sure that it hadn’t already been damaged, and Uday suppressed another impulse to violence.

  “What’s this supposed to do, anyway?” Uday said. “Suck the jinni into the bottle like a magic vacuum cleaner?”