by Ghalib Islam
Soon, superstitious people certain that somehow offering one’s body to the draw increased chances of victory began to wager half a head of hair pulled up by the roots, the tip of his nose, the peacock lashes of a young woman, her second chin, a former athlete’s chunk of calf muscle, an eyebrow, and later, when distinguished surgeons were also drawn into the fare, an ovary, a testicle, a whole cheek, a fragment of liver, a whole kidney, the fat of one’s heart, and worse, far worse. Thus began the long and gory road to the Chance Executions, whose news spread like a disease as intense as the tsetse fly sickness, and which grew in pathological popularity across the classes and walks of life in the unnameable country. Eventually, Octavio appointed an internal committee to decide and regulate the damages, though as a committed democrat he argued that the audience should have a say in the nature of the dispensation of harm, and rented a banquet hall every Friday afternoon so that a privileged number could assemble there and determine the following week’s grotesquery.
Things went on like this until the winnings were so large but the losses so much greater, and understand it was the bloodletting that interested people most. A community theatre donated its stage, and there the daily theme of crimson relit the hearts of the young and old alike. They laughed at the ugly man with matted hair like a dog’s, whose ear was torn with a yelping cry from his very head by a former torturer of the Black Organs, and who regretted everything at the point of great pain as they all did, they cheered at the fool who had bet his left eyeball to sweeten the pot some one hundred thousand dollars more, and so on.
Things got much worse after a half-dozen men arrived at Victoria with their eyes firmly shut, who did not open their eyes for a moment, arrived dressed in stiff collars and dark suits, and held hands together like children. Without tripping once over their own feet or anyone else’s, they navigated by some preternatural instinct, which somehow allowed them to augur potholes in advance and to avoid the dips in the sidewalk and the worst construction areas. They spoke to no one until they came upon the gates of the Presidential Palace. They spoke some words to the guards, which convinced him to/ but that isn’t quite right: a cloud of bees coincided with their arrival, yes more like it, and while the men droned on, the guard noticed that the bees were edging ever closer and seemed to be growing angrier and swarming in a larger crowd the longer he tarried: All right, sirs, the guard nervously passed them through.
There were other gatekeepers afterward, as we can expect, and whether this trick was repeated I cannot know, but understand that even while speaking to the Madam in the Hecatomb Office, the six eyeless men did not let go of each other’s hands or open their eyes once. The Madam listened politely, and sipped politely the tea from her saucer: half of them were from a multinational cell phone company, the other half belonged to a public relations firm, and together they were ready to invest billions into the lottery. They had already contacted Maxwell, who had been dumbfounded by the offer, was too goodhearted to be a shrewd businessman and capitulated early in negotiations, they said, and agreed to share power with the government and the sightless strategists in what was to be the greatest experiment in human history since The Mirror. After less than an hour’s conversation, they convinced the Madam’s regime to fertilize this great money plant, to water it wisely, as it would grow inestimable shoots with every cutting gesture.
As the fatal ritual spread everywhere, the six eyeless men worked tirelessly out of hotel rooms and briefcases, and within weeks formed a powerful lobby group with other businessmen that convinced the government to lower the legal gambling age to sixteen, though everyone knew it was possible for even junior high school children to buy tickets. It was a doubly useless manoeuvre since it would soon be impossible for anyone not to buy tickets.
All this occurred around the time I was bewitched by the most beautiful pair of ankles. Whose ankles, Hedayat. Who was Q. Why her ankles, which did nothing but join legs to feet, lower leg bones affixed to talus, articulated with tibia fibula, to form anklejoints that allowed her to hop here and there, to pass across the room in two or three bounds with a perfectly balanced bottle of blood on her head, two in each hand, and several more under each armpit, and a final bottle stowed neatly on the flat of a foot leaving one free foot for hopping.
But you understand: how could Hedayat not notice ankles in the bouncing swift thankless task of rushing about while feeding vampirical ghosts, of simultaneity refraction of time, one Q diaphanous tending to their pillows and another lucid dreaming by the linen closet, finger at her chin, which sheets to gather now and spread them across the floor, another guiding a ghost patient, a doddering dead Alzheimer man, by the elbow to the right spot, and another image of her elsewhere in the room, hush now, with finger to lips, pouring from the bottle to quiet a flickering woman’s bloodlust, her whimpering want for company and conversation before the ashen glow of the television set. What a din they raise, incomprehensible maatal, pagal, crazy for trading the ace of spades for king of hearts or rook for a knight in shining armour smash dominoes down on the sidetable, do this why not, while comparing memories of life or one another’s spectral pains, which continue life after death. But who.
Introduce us, Hedayat. How about that one: a once-mirrorwalker you call Fissures, who busted bloody through tain, the metal back of mirror and glass, his face and hands dripping red while travelling from image to undead, nice to meet you sitting quietly on a plastic sheet, sipping a glass of blood, blood like the kind that flows through shardwounds on his body, which only worsen with time. Like the others, he is waiting for his second death. And elsewhere in the room, the name is Rafiq, whose story is simpler: the loneliness of the coffin unsuited him, and he wept for days before clawing digging to make it out. Then some thirty others more, believe it, and Q alone to care for them all. What is the Ghost Hospice. Why the glow of the Ghost Hospice now, excavated out of the desert like a prehistoric whale skeleton, and the beautiful living bones of Q, ankles and all, returned to us.
Have you, Q raises her eyebrows.
Yes, says Hedayat, and removes from his bag the half-kilo of hashish.
Not for me, she gives him a smile.
Oh I never, he swears with a hand at his heart, I didn’t. May I, he offers after she sets the package aside, pays him with cash already at hand, before she can return to her fold of tasks.
Bemused, she allows him to take the end of the longest bedsheet in the world. Then, with fingers at each corner, a preliminary arrière-leap by both dancers as time caramelizes, and all the ghosts are watching, slowly, cameras drop slowly from the ceiling to scatter these moving images out into the universe because The Mirror knows how to suck the blood out of any spontaneous movement. (Years later, we would claim the Director himself was there to oversee the proceedings.) A flutter and the sheet spreads its wings. Two dancers’ leap assemblé to distant music, and Hedayat unwinds the cloth fold after fold, revealing light laughter, the costume beneath. Thus begins their one-act dance whose theme is conversation.
If the two dancers were moving to music in this scene, I forget the name of the piece, I forget the colour of the bedsheets, I remember very little except their movements. Of course, it did not happen this way. Relate the facts, Hedayat. The Secret Trial prefers no embellishments. And yet it was this way, exactly this way; how else to tell a life of many moments except by relating whether one remembers them as beautiful or not.
To tell the truth, I was alone that night, and Masoud was on a delivery. Though he was scheduled for a brief trip, I knew I wouldn’t see him for a long time. He had tried to convince me to accompany him, come with me, bhai, on a delivery of powdered milk and bread to a fire-besieged neighbourhood, and truly, when we got to a grimacing street of teeth and armour, of guns, guards in tanks, I thought for a moment about Niramish’s uncle’s bootlaces in their velveteen packet, thought of saying let’s fly this shit.
Go home, he said in the face of my silence, and though at that time we were still living at our respecti
ve family residences, I knew what he meant by home. I insisted weakly, let me come, I have all my papers/ No, man, I know this guy, he pointed to the closest uniformed mustachioed guard ahead of us as the line edged closer to the checkpoint, and he pushed me back against soft silk cloth against bodies in the heat. The crowd enveloped me. From light years away, amidst shapes and sweat, through a hole in an auntie’s earlobe, I watched Masoud Rana negotiate passage, bargain skilfully, offer cigarettes, accept a light, buffet interrogation search with twist and swivel words at the guard station, and it was when the mustachioed officer Masoud said he knew started cursing loud and searching indefatigable, where is he, when he started craning neck, pushing people aside with his arms, surveying the congregation of sounds and smells for a Hedayat, that I slipped hands into pockets and whistled quietly away from that barrier between shadow and shadow spaces of the unnameable country. Years later, I would find myself imprisoned and blame Masoud for my entrapment. On occasion, I would think about that time when I should have gone with my friend who did, through his wiles and great fortune, manage to negotiate passage to deliver a miserable package of powdered milk and bread to a school in a neighbourhood whose local grocery store had spontaneously combusted. Masoud Rana went away for a long time while delivering basic amenities to the region, and I didn’t accompany him because it was necessary to spend my days with others.
I, meanwhile, went to the Ghost Hospice, also known as the Halfway House, to see the girl I was already falling in love with though I had danced with her only a few times during black-pepper deliveries. On the second occasion she allowed me to fold bedsheets with her, and this time, she greeted me with her spirited embrace, before hours passed as we made the bed, watched ghosts. I asked her of their origins. Many were from the lottery, she said, others poisoned by the lottery, still others had slipped and lost legs on American bananapeel landmines, though truth be told some ghosts belonged to the common aneurysm and cancer variety of undead. How many ways to die in the unnameable country, Q sighed.
Because life continued all around her, Q, the operator of the Ghost Hospice, didn’t believe in the sanctity of death, because she knew about other deaths more devastating than the first. The rope of her hair tossed as she worked, and the whole Hospice echoed her hum and song. Why do they go on living, I asked her. Others remember them or they remember being remembered, and thusly, the living enliven the dead, she shrugged. On occasion, she said, it’s jor or jeed that persists beyond life, the sheer strength of will, and some of them say to me they would prefer even the worst parts they were denied when death hissed out in army uniform or exploded suddenly around them: the decay and vanishing of old age they never got to experience. Those were some of her answers as we folded sheets bobbing, humming goongooning fly you to the moon as Sinatra crooned vinyl, our fluttering feet never descending from above the floor as filmic reconstructions, Mirror sequences, have no doubt narrated. How beautiful Q’s ankles were.
I spent that night at the Ghost Hospice as I had done before, but on this occasion, without Masoud’s company. I slept in the storage room with cleaning supplies and shelves full of blood bottles, in a hammock. I lay awake all night listening to the sound of spiders knitting clouds from floor to door to ceiling.
When Masoud was away, I began to neglect my business and to spend all my time with Q. There was simply too much work at the Ghost Hospice, too many words. Q and I funnelled blood into bottles, which arrived in vats off the backs of vans once a week.
What kind of blood.
Human.
Really.
She wouldn’t verify and smiled mischievous. I lifted her chin up to the light and her smile overflowed.
There was much to do: drugs and palliative care to provide, liquid meals to prepare, we had to endure the peregrinations through hell that every ghost, no matter how well adjusted to a second life, disappeared into, foulmouthed and overflowing. And then one day, to deal with the inevitable: an errant touch or a sheet of sunlight too heavy, and burst into ash with a slight rotten odour, which meant one had to sweep up ghost ashes and perform the rites appropriate for a second passing. But time passed as we did these things and watched these things together, and the Ghost Hospice filled with our love.
Then one day, a fee fi swing of the front doors and a giant interruption in the form of a business partner and friend, Masoud Rana swinging arms, knocking over this and spilling that, pissed is what, why weren’t you there, hear him asking me, forgetting he was the one who told me not to follow him, yet remembering correctly, however, that I should have protested rather than assented to his request. Why didn’t you help me, he empties the refrigerator to find a cold soda. Where were you when I descended the longest line of stairs with a barrel at my back, a uniformed Uncle trailing, forcing me to traverse corridors where radio antennae swoop silently and suck up the tiniest particles of thoughts.
How was it, I grinned all bhai-bhai and shit, did you deliver the milk.
Yes, he said soberly, milk and bread both, he said, and sipped his soda, heaving, sobbing. Before narrating his return trip across the checkpoint he told me another story first, this one about how last night, he slept on the floor of a classroom next to a teacher who let me into her abode, he said, after long wander in brick and pothole streets with dinner supplies in my backpack. I arrived after a night’s interrogation in the early-evening sunlight still so incendiary you had to gambol across hot hot sands after congested minivan ride that left you staring at houses converging streets, wondering which was the house with the ram’s head knocker that had ordered powdered milk. I asked this person that person, touched invisible coins with fingers, I paid a man that sold iced drinks who told me where, and there she was, I finally saw her through a mouth-open front door, there she was nesting hungry students, infants spread out on the floor around what turned out to be her bed, a thin central mattress and sheet, while older pupils slept in a column of hammocks suspended from the ceiling, each level accessible by stepladder. Since I brought bread and powdered milk, she was able to provide a rudimentary meal for the kids, some of whom had to be awakened for the occasion, and with the remainder of the milk and bread, she began hatching a dessert using eggs and sugar she had on hand, which she said would make a tasty breakfast on the hotplate near the back of the classroom. What is the name of this place, I asked her while she cooked. It used to be called Epsilante, she said, home of traditional spider harvest. And now, I asked her. Ask the Director or Xamid Sultan, head of National Security, she said, or the Americans, she laughed a little too loudly, looked around to catch waking eyes, put a hand up to her mouth.
Masoud told the tale with his usual swagger, in real time so moments weighed life’s minutes, and we listened as we ate after our day’s work. At a pause on fork and plate, with a cough, Q left came back with a shine tilting right left right left in hand, sat beside us and what’s that, I asked. I took the winning lottery ticket from her, an old kind like the ones you could buy a long time ago, and looked at the holographic image of New York City skyscrapers pawing clouds in three-dimension photograph above date and time of flight, gasped, you’re shitting me, I said. Many years later, I would shiver thin T-shirt in air-conditioned airport with face pressed to fog window glass, weeping blood from stomach wound while watching Q depart forever, but this time we talked tongues, as here, she mumbled here, onto my mouth in damp light. I didn’t argue with her as, hand in hand, we departed Masoud’s company/ where the hell are you two/ never mind, she told him as she pulled me toward the interior of the Hospice.
Time passed and Masoud Rana and I saw less of each other. He knocked now before entering the Halfway House, while recently, he would have burst door heaving rabbithaul by scruff of its neck: See what I bring you, he would have announced, before throwing a pound bag of herb on kitchen table or a thousand-dollar catch of bills. Q and I had become inseparable and he remained incorrigible in his bahir and black-pepper ways. Although she and I lived grant to NGO grant, cans of tuna, two pit
a bread meals a day, her sheer determination and ebullience was food enough for me.
Time passed and one day, the television told us the Americans were adding a vast prison facility to the old tapereel Archives of the Ministry of Records and Sources, which had been replaced by newer technological surveillance facilities, to house accused terrorists outside the jurisdiction of sunlight and beyond even the sight of God, and that this act of the central government had aroused in the people a desire for rebellion unknown since the first days of The Mirror. One hundred thousand people had taken to the streets and Victoria University and La Maga Technical Institute had once again become heated centres of resistance.
Recall at that time, however, we were all much weaker than when the Director first arrived. By continuously watching and recording us in filmed instalments, The Mirror demoralized and weakened the spirit of the whole population; it made us wish shadows could be exchanged between people, or that the art of ventriloquism had developed to a point where one could throw one’s voice beyond reach of the microphones. The Chance Games, meanwhile, as they were also called, had reduced all our focus to the immediate present, destroyed most links with the past and nearly all understanding of a future beyond the petty goals of the Cola prize or the avoidance of glass shards in an unfortunate can of coffee crystals, and which led at most to winning more cans and therefore to more tickets and, more than anything, to an infinite increase in the discourse of cars and houses, which could also be won, and which we were all supposed to want.