by Ghalib Islam
Just as Badsha Abd et al are trying to devise a method of rotating the lowest man on a potential human pyramid to compete against racing suffocation, simultaneously declaring futility, defeat, as well as screaming at the guards look at us help us, the sandstorm ceases and the front door opens to reveal an enormous carnivore in desert military costume, whose heaving breaths move the room’s dust in swirls and who seems more fearful than being buried alive.
Although his great shadow hides his face, they know him from television, magazines, radio, newspapers as the man that governs the ungovernable interior of the unnameable country, from mere suggestion of his figure, his characteristic war limp, his plodding steps and immense appetite. He sits on a chair that barely supports his weight, at the wide dinner table that just reaches his knees, and on which the girl who served the film crew prisoners water from a vase produces six dozen eggs, a whole head of lamb, whose brains he prepares to consume by making a careful circumference incision of the skull with garden shears, a large bucket of pilaf rice, ten kilograms of alfalfa sprouts, steamed landlorn shellfish resistant to all manoeuvres of cutlery, a pot of chickpea salad with tomatoes and finely chopped cucumbers.
In between the khir and dahi, he notices the diminutive film crew inching closer to the crumbs and remainder shells of his escargot dinner contents that now grace the knee-high sands on the floor of the eating chamber.
The giant watches, bemused by the cautious steps of the starved, parched film crew prisoners whose guards are lost to card hands in their isolated revelry. Harsh bidis and strong drink follow dessert as Mamun Ben Jaloun discovers a forgotten whole mutton roast at the edge of the table, and then booming laughter, vibration into marrow as the crew asks again, Mr. Giant, if you are listening, some food, if you may. The giant, who hadn’t heard the first request due to damaged ears years of exploded cartridge yells in desert sunshine see the faintest scurry in the horizon, fire in the hole, said nothing and watched the crew make a pyramid with knees on backs on knees to the table surface. Then his hardest laughter at the toppled sight of splayed bodies on sand as success after all: they have the mutton.
Tell me, who are you, little men that eat of my table, and why do you molest Epsilante, my home and county.
No one asks his name in turn because they know the man of the many metal lapels on his costume, this Murray whose face is so blinding they are forced to look at his boots under the table or at his pants, the same pair he wore when he cooked all the earlobes, fingers, toenails, gallbladder and viscera of an enemy with sea salt over a gas stove. They fear to look at the mouth of the man who once spoke with it the decree to bring to him the cooked bodies of all the people on the street that had refused to grant him his specially designed, universally acknowledged salute, which required all the limbs of one’s body to perform when he passed, and so many limbs and ounces of indeterminable flesh had gathered in his audience at a dinner table with silverware, candelabras, and serving coffins that he had supposedly wept into the collar of his ring-hand man General Gargantua, my one true companion in the world because only you understand my feeling that despite all the moral ignominy and United Nations inquisitions good food should not go to waste/ the film crew already knew Murray.
We are travellers, Mamun Ben Jaloun answers, filmmakers, who have permits, he says as sand falls through the hole in the ceiling and rises higher every moment.
As the film crew eats on the floor, the girl with the water vase with floating petals returns to pour into their hands one by one. She sits next to my father, who out of the desire to repay her hospitality offers her a bite of his dinner portion. She obliges his request, and asks why the film crew has arrived at this viper’s nest, since her giant master is known to have watched others buried by descending sands while he ate meal after meal seated higher above. My father would be frightened if it wasn’t for the girl’s murmurs like a cat intoxicating preening sounds mewling and soft pawing at his face and hair, the server suddenly soft before him as lips touch lips a key to more urgent caresses, her whispers now, before the giant awakens, before the guards turn their heads from their endless prattle of cards, she says as she points to a corner of the room a mile away.
My father looks up at the towering source of snoring sounds headdown fast asleep on a table far larger than its last appearance, and astonished, he notices the gun-toting guards have turned into hunchedover boulders at the corner of the table, their lifeless guns now also granite, their cards whoosh into the wind through the ceiling has begun again to scatter the sands and the cards, a windstorm in the room and a mile to walk in the desert at your eyelids in your lungs, you worry about the camera equipment as much as your health.
When Mamun Ben Jaloun and the film crew discovered the ladder against the wall that led up to the ceiling hatch, they turn around just in time to see the overturning table, the bellow of the great beast their captor realizing his alcoholic error, the listless boulder guards whose card-playing carelessness has turned them into rocks against better judgment, his underestimation of this Mamun Ben Jaloun and his film crew who are now almost at the ceiling hatch out of his subterranean lair.
The giant is blinded by drunken rage, by the windstorm of a room designed for fearful mystery, and forced to drag feet through sands difficult for even his long strides. The ceiling hatch gives problems for the first few attempts as ants in a line up a ladder to the prize it finally opens with an ambitious howl into the greater dustbowl than in the room.
Through the ceiling hatch: my father and the film crew fly far from one another in the ragged dust, and against the stronger winds outside at their eyes and senses than in the giant’s lair they strive to gather themselves. When Mamun Ben Jaloun finds a wall a lee against the storm, he rests a moment inside his heartbeat.
Love, you ask. We are not at the cemetery of spiderclouds yet, just its premonition: Mamun Ben Jaloun looks around him and sees cirrus wisps cover the wall, the street, sees webs thread the road ahead; my mother and father haven’t met yet but the fated spiders of their first encounter have already laid the groundwork.
Mamun the boom-mike operator follows the gossamer threads to the first shopkeep that obliges him a glass of water. The film crew, he describes their equipment and adventure-beaten hide and wear, and of course the bric-a-brac salesman knows, they’re leaving the first day of the coming month, staying currently at Sural’s hotel, he provides address and direction.
At the hotel, a lot of camera equipment and professional opinions have gathered in the foyer. Abd greets a filmmaker friend he knows from a previous project and the two of them talk about their current movies, which are peripheral scenes, they agree, in the gargantuan Mirror that is all the images and has colonized the country since a time no one can remember anymore. Abd shares his thoughts on spiderclouds, which American armaments manufacturers have been working hard to transform into antiballistics weaponry, while his colleague, Rasul, relates his filming of giants in the region. My hypothesis, he says to Badsha, is that eating human flesh makes one physically huge.
Before they part ways, he asks Badsha, where are you going next, and when he hears the response, La Maga, he claps loud, shit, man, he says, and adds that only in a few other cities in the unnameable country does the movie truly represent its title in theme and form. He talks of a place where mirrors choke streets and of an unnameable resistance exploding reflective labyrinth walls in that place. Rasul tells him that spiderthread is evermore becoming the reason for the American occupation: they want it on all army apparel, he says, from bullet-resistant vests to tank shields; it would change the shape of the soldier from heavy metal klunk to fleet feet on the ground or in the air.
Abd nods, such an inimitable resource, he says.
And so the Americans, Rasul points at the occupation army everywhere in the unnameable country.
While they converse, not too far away, my father continues taking notes of the shopkeep’s description, asks what of these spiderclouds. What of them, man, quips the
shopkeep. I have never seen anything like them, says Mamun Ben Jaloun. They are everywhere in Epsilante, but especially in darker places, points the seller of sunwarmed cola and sugar biscuits toward an area of gravemounds on mottled soil and serious flowers.
Mamun Ben Jaloun is curious.
SPIDERCLOUDS
Cirrus clouds cover the cemetery grounds where my mother and father first meet. A girl is collecting, basketing the clouds, which are everywhere on gravemounds, thicker between skeletal branches of the cemetery’s flora. As for fauna, minnow lizards accustomed to such environments feed on spiders and insects caught in spiderwebs, dart up for quick catches before retreating into shadows. Local lore features these animals in stories; their iridescent skin means fire for short, whether flames of watchout for burn or the softer light of lust love or romance.
Light and shadow in the cemetery. Feminine silhouette against moving clouds and moon soft pulses of light against a body hunched from carrying a basket on its back. Then the girl rises and my father hears the grey sounds, her evocations: arachnids moving in the clouds their nests, spiders like the ones the camera crew has thus far encountered.
Recall the unnameable history: even before John Quincy landed on our shores and sent uniformed others like him into our nation’s viscera, industrialists had appropriated spiderthread into their design and conquest, but age-old methods of spider harvesting have lingered in some communities of our nation.
Badsha Abd’s records of dynamited wells are remembered today as well as his footage of traditional methods of harvesting spiderthread, which he collected at my father’s insistence that we know of the spiders, but not of their close latticework, microscopic artistry, their sheer proliferation in cemeteries and gardens where people still harvest spiderwebs by hand for design work.
Her eyes haunt, serval’s glisten, cat eyes in nightblackness. We needed you tonight, Badsha Abd tells Mamun Ben Jaloun after my father reunites with the film crew at Sural’s hotel, takes news of their next spider destination, makes haste at the first opportunity back to the cemetery of spiderwebs to catch sight of her rare harvest. I was occupied, he says to describe his increasing absences. How so.
My father speaks briefly on the cemetery of spiderwebs as a curious scientific phenomenon but reveals few details of the girl his heart.
The camera crew begs Mamun Ben Jaloun to allow night footage of their meetings and of this region’s rare methods of dealing and making with spiderthread. So adamant he is and so nervous their encounters will not culminate into even a kiss, he asks Badsha Abd for direction. The filmmaker, however, is too thirsty for footage and in no mood for love. Tell the girl to join the crew; my clothes are tatters and there are spider sanctuaries where we’re going.
Night fevers, sleeplessness, biting entrails, Mamun Ben Jaloun is afflicted by involuntary summons of feline eyes by invented names because he does not know the name of the spider harvester. He stalls the crew’s departure by any means, citing the importance of gossamer clouds deep in the region’s dynamited wells that require filming, as he prepares for his own efforts of the heart with a demonstration. She is perplexed by his commitment to the camera’s focus, its film reel and insect ardour of load, reload, his stories of its ability to catch and retell the world, by his utter devotion to a machine. What do you make, he takes her hand against all judgment. A low wind pushes the cemetery clouds and the light hesitates moonlight sunlight she is talking, touching, moving around a room in which spidersilk leotards are arranged on wax mannequins where her host of silk shirts and ballet shoes are scattered on a hard wooden floor from which rises a skeletal rack, spidersilk shawls, my own design, touch, she tells, and his fingers seem to pass through the fabric as he raises it to her cheek.
The filmmaker in my father is enthralled by the colours and objects before him, by her loom and this dressmaker’s esoteric craft, this woman who invokes in him the conviction that the rhythm of all the world is flesh fingers cheek water breath eyelashes touch eyelashes, nose bumps nose, excuse me, they laugh, and hours, days pass in such cases, we will excuse them to their desires and move with Badsha Abd’s words: We will move, the director says, when the search party returns with the latest news, I’m due back in the studio tomorrow.
Mist and sand, prickles of light in the distance: when my father and the girl spot the film crew caravan, they are a mile away because they had not thought before the morning’s mouthfuls of patisserie they passed between lips open doors to their desires dragged morning into afternoon sun until there were no sheets on the bed anymore because they had been replaced by all the sugar in the house.
Everyone in town knew of the film crew’s whereabouts, thankfully, and it was at the borders of Epsilante when they finally saw Badsha Abd’s curious circus moving on horses and donkeys as if motor vehicles hadn’t been invented. Then the cinematographer and the girl find feet tossing high sands smoke panting fast breaths and furious screaming, lungeing, waving arms, carrying, pushing forward. Someone notices them running and shouting and sends a man on an animal for them. Thank you, my father looks ahead at the approaching sight, then at the girl with the serval’s eyes he has already begun to love.
How did you know, she asks between kisses, how did you know my name.
THE MIRROR
The young couple employ the documentary crew’s journey through desert and mountain and plain territories to understand each other’s company, tirelessly conversing, kissing, grooming, cooking together, and bask in wild orchards where arachnids cast nets to catch pools of sunlight that float in their basins long after dark. They bid goodbye to Badsha Abd’s caravan of cameras and rare silk only after they become dazzled enough by a place they think deserves their anchor, just as Badsha Abd departed to make ways deeper into unnameable spider sanctuaries. They decided to call La Maga, with its artificial canal recently fashioned to connect the city with the Jubba River rippling water like metal glass, home. I’ve been here before, my father wanted to say to my mother, but his playback singer’s life seemed like another world, and La Maga had been burned and rebuilt by movie sets so many times, he could hardly recognize it.
La Maga. Here, a thirty-degree-angle man leans his whole weight on a pole. He walks the length of a ship and pushes, glides it backward through the artificial canal. Open glass elevators affixed to the outside of buildings would rise and fall according to people’s needs, and it was such a bustling young city that even the President had bought a home there. He would arrive in a long motorcade without warning, and dragging a circus. He was good personal friends with the Director, who had a seat in the Privy Council and called the shots on zoning and the construction of new streets and movie sets in the country. The Director’s great project, reflected in his work’s title, was a madhouse of mirrors turned country into unnameable maze, which left us bewildered and frightened each time we needed to step outside for basic amenities. Luckily, the nameless rebels, who believed the film was actually a way for the national security forces to team up with the occupation Americans to contain all movement in our country to predictable reflection, broke all the mirrors near my parents’ home only to find them replaced with duplicates, which they destroyed. On and on went the tit-for-tat until the time of Hedayat’s birth, when the rebels managed to guard sufficient free walking space for people in our neighbourhood to do their daily business.
Recall at that time, Anwar, president of our country, governor of an unnameable region of the world, would sit at the table with his favourite horse, Dulcinea, whom he had acquired by exchanging the doll corpse of Caroline Margarita Quincy as the primary seat of his affections, having at least publicly given up all scientific experiments in necromancy; though it was said that secretly he had driven his researchers to abandon the twentieth-century laboratory in favour of the mercurial occult arts of the European medieval age in hopes of restoring the queen to life. Recall his equine love was more rewarding than the listless rooster romances he would conduct in the shadowy corners of the Presidential
Palace with maids and whoever may come, and one that he defended in his mad older years as if it were the sanctified union of husband and wife. He would feed her oats from his own hand and comb her roan coat and braid her hair even in front of foreign dignitaries; he taught her to sleep curled up next to him in a vast, comfortable bed of straw mattresses. He would ride her, but never for long distances, and only for her own health, and would not allow anyone else to clean up her shit. And he still ruled the unnameable country as if he were an unruly child, with the desire to bestow upon it the order of a perfectly predictable train schedule and the eradication of simple pestilences, two things for which, after all was said and done, one could not fault him. At least during the time of Anwar the Great, people still say, men and women did not fall asleep standing up in the middle of conversations due to the plague of the tsetse fly.
But the internal dynamics of government were less than stable: the Director’s encroachment on La Maga, for instance, though it brought down foreign Western investment, drench-drowned the city, was a deviance the Kremlin did not interpret lightly, and within the Privy Council and among his closest supporters, opinions were split and grumbles sounded. Anwar recognized the slow demise of the Eastern bloc; Grenadier Lhereux had been following American economists, who had been predicting it for years, and the President no longer believed in the panacea, as he did in his early years, of delinking from global capitalism. Finally a pragmatist in his autumnal years, he turned to the West, let in the termites of foreign investment and ownership, and watched the walls crumble, or, as it is more apt to say, transform into mirrors. They brought them in frigates, landed on Victoria shores with a million of them, men in uniform that planted them on the streets there, and Benediction was flooded reflective within a week. By the time they got to La Maga, American military boys were such experts at setting up labyrinth-walls they covered the city in less than a day. Though we had heard that the mirrors were no joking matter and that they were defended by the most powerful guns in the world, some people thought it was fun at first. Local goondas tried to make off with a few of them and were arrested so fast, beaten bloody pulp and stored in vacuum jailcells for so long, most people left the mirrors alone after that.