Fire in the Unnameable Country

by Ghalib Islam

  Fear rose to my throat and I patted the lump in my shirt’s secret compartment. I passed Masoud a lace. What is it, he whispered. My grandfather’s bootlace. What the hell. They’re magic. Are you out of your mind, he lifted his head and looked at the guards creeping closer. Just tie it to your ankle, asshole.

  It would have been simpler, I argue, if he had just done as I had asked because mere whispers more were enough to bring them uniforms and breathing down our shirts.

  Two guards found Masoud and me sitting strangers, human faces among animals. They pointed bawdy tough, snickered, separated us, lifted me, turned me upside down by my ankles. Loose change, a gram packet of black pepper for personal consumption dropped to the floor. Masoud Rana removed all the couriers’ items on his person at firm request, all bags and clips and clasps, all hidden cavities of his backpack found and searched and itemized while we were only trying to deliver foodstuffs to the animals, I argued.

  The guards would have none of it, however, and pointed guns: march.

  At first, Niramish’s uncle’s bootlaces fluttered silently behind our shoes, and he’s a parlour magician after all, I thought as we remained captured as if without them. The guards kept their guns focused lasersights and forced us walk one dark corridor before the next turn onto another passage of thoughtreel shelves. We passed a figure of a man whole body contorting slow silent scream before reaching an area where the sky breathed into the open underground. In that place they were still mere feet behind us. Then a long, narrow flight of stairs appeared, extended upward for miles.

  Masoud Rana’s heavy gait and horse exhalations kept rhythm for the march. Time passed and I felt exhausted in the midday heat, so hungry I brought the taste of the steamed air, on which the animals subsisted, to my lips. I thought too bad Masoud and I were handsup and empty your pockets whisked away before eating. While I chewed the thought, Masoud tapped my shoulder look: I turned my gaze to the improbable sight: the guards had been thwarted by our climb though courier friend and I thought we were making casual captured pace. They were miles behind us, running, and their bullets made a racket if you listened carefully. Above us rose easy steps into a hole of sky. That was when I realized the promised flight of Niramish’s uncle’s gift, its magic beguiling to both wearer and warder.

  Masoud and I hugged and cheered our luck and wished the animals well in absentia, Dog and Rabbit Woman and the Fish with Fu Manchus. We bounded up the final steps of the stairway with festive hearts, aided by a gust of good wind. Masoud gave a shout when he reached the surface of the cavity entrance of the Archives and leapt so high he almost snagged the power lines, touched ground with an imp’s glee ribald laugh, your grandfather’s bootlaces, he yelled: good shit. He jumped again and again and careful, I shouted as he bounded across the moving car road with ease before bouncing in place on the sidewalk for an instant, calling me come on, man, and then leaping loud over houses and rooftops and away.

  THE CENTIMETRE PATCH

  Masoud Rana became a flea-leaping dot bounced far from Hedayat’s urgent cries. They landed in opposite ends of the city. Masoud fell close enough to an old drug-runner associate’s pad to dig in for respite from weightlessness and the assurance of a sweet drink. Hedayat landed in recognizable street turns and found the alleyway of grey soot and lead exhaust fumes where the motorcycle gang the Taints once conferred in a garage a generation earlier, close to his parents’ home. His last brief visit was in the interim between heist partners months earlier, and he felt compelled to say hello.

  Recall: our hero hugged the streetlight for warmth on an equatorial summer eve at the sight of changes. How long had I been underground, I wondered, that the world could become flickering pixelations whole walls full, ads for stadium stage acts on Game Nights of lottery and organs, of stylized billboard images of previous numbers and their associated operations, pictures announcing championing what I would soon learn was the grizzly lottery. He wanted to confer with Masoud but his colleague had travelled so fast, so far with each leap away from Hedayat, yours truly decided on other streets, to jump instead into familiar territory of people cars noises, a neighbourhood he recognized.

  Hedayat’s visit home was one of respite and recovery like Masoud Rana’s pitstop at a grime-associate’s, far from the shit and premonition of rattraps or gunblasts of the Warren tunnels. The next day, he fell buzzing out of bed late afternoon and walked into the kitchen rolling his animal tongue sour, searching for something to eat, and was assailed by five answers to a question Gita asked: Does anyone want raisins in her bowl of wheat germ, spoken in five voices he did not recognize. Four replied yes, and one said no. His mind fluttered and the memories realigned with the last of the voices, which spoke in a loud, assured manner unlike the others.

  Hedayat was able to reconcile that he actually knew all the speakers, and that he was listening to none other than the Yea and Nay Quintuplets, who were born in his absence but about whom his father had sent word via motorcycle messenger just prior to an important drug run while the son was more concerned with building a successful courier service in the Warren tunnels. It was Nehi who had spoken loudest. The others, Ha, Hum, Ji, and Achha, were quieter, less raucous insistent of what they wanted, though they accepted their grandmother’s offer. Today they wanted to go to the Chance Executions, and spoke of it with as much enthusiasm as their aunts had talked of disco and punk music many years before, though the four girls hadn’t yet lost their milk teeth and were very far from reaching the threshold of adolescence.

  Psst, bhaiya, Nehi called me.

  You’re not going with the others.

  No, it’s no fun with them, she said, and directed follow me with a finger.

  Where are we going, I pushed aside the cobwebs in her room made by the spiders she kept as pets, exhibits, she called their soft cottonlight. I peered at a latch on the floor she lifted up after pushing aside an area rug.

  What’s this, I picked up your hull and metal shine as I held you. I pried apart your receptacle pieces and ash exploded into my mouth and nose. They stared at me from the metal box then: fragments, tape remains amidst the dust. Is this what I think it is, I poked the ash with a finger, raised it delicately to nostrils.

  That’s when it happened again, this time as grey lights asphalt bursting on my tongue. I inhaled the dust a thoughtmetal taste in my mouth; then fire along my skin in all my senses. Are you okay, bhaiya, Nehi called me from behind, and that’s when it happened again. Again I turned my neck one hundred and eighty degrees like an owl, like the time Niramish showed me strange fruits hanging boughs in the playground, when we shared an exploded eye and busted hands, when my hands turned talons, recall.

  I saw Nehi when I turned my head owl around. She was right there of course, but I saw something else too, a faraway sight that was more than the rectangle smears mere lines I saw when Niramish and I and the exploded playground scene. It appeared clearer to me this time, as a roomful of workers in cubicles wearing headphones who seemed more palpable, realer than Nehi or Hedayat. I reached out to touch an image that seemed living, threatened to become my world as Nehi’s voice swirled around me. I couldn’t see her and the oldmetal grating fell from my hands when I saw what I saw with owl eyes. What, Hedayat, what did you see. But I also heard it and felt it too is the thing. What did you feel, what was it you heard. This, I thought to myself: I understood that/ tell me, bhai, Nehi tugged my sleeve, but I ignored her entreaties, threw open the bedroom window for quick breaths. I gathered myself, reassembled the moments and wondered how I had managed, once again, to turn my head a hundred and eighty. And what the hell was the office image that suddenly assaulted me, I thought; what was the fear it made inside me.

  I gasped at Nehi’s kind touch on my arm reminded me of the material world. After four moments, I pointed to all the shit and caboodle visible through our window. What is all this, I asked, oblivious suddenly of the meaning of the wood metal plastic construction crews everywhere. It’s been happening in our street fo
r months, don’t you remember, she said patiently, don’t you remember when they brought everything in a convoy of trucks. It’s been happening all over the country for years, she reminded as if I had never been born. What, I asked, and she didn’t say anything because everyone knew about The Mirror, because she was waiting for the past to return to me and for everything to make sense again. She fixed her chin on the window ledge and watched the scaffolds affixed to scaffolds with me. We talked of bones and the largest movie set in the world.

  I had to peel back from the window when I lost my breath trying to follow all the wires hugging walls, travelling neighbourhood to neighbourhood, each constellation of lights camera action forming its own universe, movie sets, I mean, whose dimensions and moods were regulated precisely to indicate year and event, history and motif. What is The Mirror and what do they say of The Mirror. Recall The Mirror arrived, guns blazing, with the fanfare of coup d’état. It shattered the windows of the Presidential Palace and found all the doors, entered rooms without knocking. Unknown unknowns found throats, hearts bled in beds of men with hands on wives’ cheeks as film crew personnel excuse me pardon me ma’am quite politely, in the cases of political personnel useful to the new regime to keep alive, threaded wires around beds, hung bright halogen lamps and situated tripods, as politicians is it truly necessary yelled come back at a better hour, while their less than lucky peers found barrels pointed faces/

  60 Minutes would later reveal that Anwar, whose father had been John Quincy’s personal bodyguard in youth and later rose ranks in Parliament, had contacted the Director of the CIA personally mere hours before the event, which felled Baltazar, the preceding ass in power, and several of his closest advisers, who had been informed the invasion would take place later that month and that they would be spared. From the palace to the streets: The Mirror spread wildly, scripted to evade climate and terrain, geography and culture, and we heard that other countries with difficult names and obscure locations had also featured similar shifts in power and certain cinematic historical developments.

  Bhaiya, I felt Nehi’s hand, Bhaiya, are you okay.

  I reeled vertiginous as I thought about all that crap and related some of it to Nehi from documentaries and school texts. I lost track of my office vision as I watched them reinvent the world.

  At that time, the apartment above the hosiery shop had become very crowded. The old linen room where Shukriah and Gita used to store odds and ends for the shop was first transformed into a nursery before it became a study and play area for the Quintuplets. Hammocks were now spread out all over to house them sleeping suspended through the night or humid afternoons. In the rare occasions he found himself at home, Hedayat taught his sisters how to read, though Nehi the autodidact taught herself. One day, he listened to her fantastical first written sentences: I found your telltale thoughts under my floor, Nehi wrote, but I don’t know how to hear them beat, she sighed on the page.

  The only time Hedayat found peace in the house was when he gave his sisters time; on all other occasions he was forced to wear cotton earplugs to suppress the sound of his mother’s endless when will you, will you ever, is it not time, and this one: when will it have been that you, all of her entreaties on finishing school, at least secondary school, and then a college education, why not, with your owlish brains, something better at least than an ass’s post, until he could no longer tolerate the turbid perspiring walls or the sense that all the abscesses of her disappointment would burst at once.

  Gita, meanwhile, older, slower, and wiser than her daughter-in-law, didn’t care for the fact that her grandson had little formal education. Rather, her crooked finger beckoned him come hither, you, beckoned hear her worries of those tunnels you traverse, Hedayat. She spoke of her worries of those people, her worries of busting bulldozers dividing the country into movie-set fragments, of the sheer geological weight pressing for decades for centuries millennia eons millions of years on the tunnels on the country from above.

  At that time, the crate-porter lives of Masoud Rana and Hedayatin the Warren tunnels, suppliers of canned meats and relatively fresh vegetables and fruits, cigarettes and the like, came to an abrupt end, as we were informed by the higherups immediately to make the switch and to begin transporting goods of higher yield: Carl Gustav rifles, ammonium nitrate, locally manufactured grenades, hardly a charity now.

  What do you think, Uncleboy informed one day, picking his teeth with a switchblade. Besides, the people will eat better with less of The Mirror and the Madam. How could we then. Totally impossible to resist when the pure rationality: which is to indicate the metalglinting threat of a higherup. The high-density mirrors and asphyxiating security in the region of La Maga, we heard now what we didn’t from Gita. The purchasers, of course, were the usual suspects: the People’s Rifle Brigade and other parties the Madam tried to destroy but whose guns she could not take away from making the air hotter more humid or from harassing the Madam’s regime and The Mirror.

  Despite what you might think, the first crowd was not all gloomy characters. Some of them told sad jokes in uplifting voices and delivered joyous lines with frowning faces. They had the habit of wearing ballet slippers like the nameless rebels, were also swift-footed like their predecessors, who had splintered into five thousand factions throughout the city and regrouped into mostly religious dissident parties, which pulled up the world’s eyebrows and over time heaped scorn on the unnameable country. Furthermore, they had the habit of razoring their beards thin, of peppering their words with English phrases, using backslang like all the youths, and talking excitedly about the latest American mobile gadgetry. In one breath they would curse The Mirror, and in the following bless the latest L.A. blockbuster and all its minutiae. Also, they possessed the habit of disappearing like the wind in the middle of a conversation, and left you wondering whether you had been speaking to yourself the whole time.

  On the one hand, such groups did not exist. The Madam’s regime tried for years to deny their very reality and surreptitiously to send sharpshooters to appear out of that grey mass of smouldered bricks or the greyorange dusklight before a chessplaying crowd/ suddenly human and gun in hand, oh look at that, or for the clouds to part and to allow there/ surprise, a young Black Hawk pilot, leap now or the endless: they found it difficult sometimes to deny that members of the People’s Rifle Brigade died, is what I mean to say, or that the people in their homes died in droves during targeted assassinations, or that the funereal cries of their survivors were often as large as when Niramish had passed. Because sometimes the dead jumped mirrors into the vast electronic world and could not be silenced in their coffins.

  In such moments the Madam would respond in her swaggerspeech, which grew so recognizable it nearly drove out the caramelized timbre of Anwar the Memory from our earholes: There are some intransigent classes of individuals, she would say, and it is true they are a threat to the stability of our/ but not for long, hear now, what are the numbers to the Chance Executions this week, because at that time everyone was talking about the Chance Executions.

  What were the Chance Executions. And how will they speak of the Chance Executions in years to come. Recall, for it is common knowledge, at first the Chance Executions were just games of luck, not unlike those that had always existed in the unnameable country since anyone could remember, and that began with the everyday sale of tokens and the plucking of four lucky numbers at dusk by its inventor, Maxwell’s friend, the entrepreneur Octavio. He would draw them out of a motorized spinning cage in Victoria’s Circle Point, amidst the shawl sellers, the stacks of overblown movie posters, and the vendors of bottled piquant peppers, where the crowd gathered at the end of each day, young and old alike, whether to play or to gawk, and he dispensed prizes and they were all predictable and cash at that time. Let it be known, however, that even in the earliest days the Games drew a sizeable following, since the spinning cage was bejewelled with a set of blinking lights and the display above it would announce the numbers with a whirrin
g sound that was pleasing, and also because Octavio had an open-hearted way of speaking that was known by all since he lived in a mixed neighbourhood rather than a gated Euro-American community.

  It was sheer drunken folly at first, when a singularly important effect was introduced to the Games. We can blame chance: a man, a whoever man, nameless and an irrelevant regular of the cage lottery with pinpricked skin on his vermilion cheeks, was accused in Octavio’s presence at a garage bar in the capital by some of his friends of having been favoured in the last draw. While the owner sipped his spiked lemonade and tried to take no notice, Vermilion Cheeks walked over and slung his arm over the lottery baron before offering thusly: Give them what they want, boss. Let there be a little cutting if I lose tomorrow. I say the removal of a patch of my arm skin one centimetre squared.

  At that moment, a musician with the unlikely name of Elvis was detuning his guitar because he was about to play a bolero, and his instrument drooped the very air. This churned the pit of Octavio’s stomach as it laboured to adjust to the atmospheric difference. He replied he had no intention of changing the simple principle of a game of zero or small fortune. But then he saw the whole bar fall to raucous enthusiasm with desire for Vermilion Cheeks’ potential maiming, and he reluctantly agreed for the price of his night’s revelries that the wagerer should be removed of his patch of arm skin tomorrow if he did not draw the winning numbers.

  The companions of Vermilion Cheeks, who had goaded and entreated him to cast the negative lot, bought more tickets than usual and convinced others to do the same. In fact, more tickets were sold the following day than ever, and out of luck or fear the unnameable individual managed to save his skin by winning a small sixth-place prize of one hundred dollars, which drew cheers and many jeers from the crowd. He won again the next day, the fourth-place prize, and on this occasion he had been persuaded to increase the potential risk to a four cubic centimetre patch and two millimetres deeper into skin.