by Ghalib Islam
All the while, Mamun wished for his wife to return to her regular prior-to-pregnancy self, before she became the garrulous whispering, laughingtoherself woman into which the fetal Hedayat had transformed her. Everything had changed. What in the old days was sure to be the sound of wedding firecrackers or the effusion of Roman candles in the celebration of a birth was now more likely the exchange of shots between the Director’s security forces and the rebels or the explosion of a mirror-wall.
Years earlier, when he and Shukriah were close, she would be able to say upon his return home you were in suchandsuchasection in the Archives today, not because the odours would linger on his clothing but because they shared everything then and it was natural to be able to understand the particulars of the other’s reality whenever either of them wanted to. Later, during the period of her oracular conversations with her unborn son, Mamun Ben Jaloun felt the tain of a mirror creep up between his mind and hers, as if when she gazed at him she saw only her/ and he was banished from knowing her thoughts in those long eight and a half years. Shukriah, meanwhile, honed her insights to certain prescience and would have been able to travel through the labyrinth of thoughts blindfolded if she had wanted, to distinguish ages and genders and to outline in advance whole stories of magnetized captured minds without the aid of a tape player.
It took years and much entreaty for Mamun Ben Jaloun to acquire a penlight from Supervisor, who reluctantly provided and which enabled our hero to read the names printed on the Archive reels. For many months, his job involved only to identify by the sound quality of the recorded thoughts which magnetic files were chronologically misplaced in row upon row of unending columns. While he knew, because Supervisor had informed him, and as well due to his official wanderings, that the Archives were strictly divided into quadrants, he would often discover that one section ended too soon or another started before expected. Having a penlight did not help with these broader demarcations since the effect of the instrument was deliberately weak and designed only for close inspections of individual files, and he was told repeatedly to clip his nosehairs, to habituate himself to wearing deafening headphones when not at work so as to keep a clear set of ears for Archives sounds, and, ultimately, to hone his hearing organs.
It was a hard job that started you dawn-early, made you wait outside Supervisor’s office with other Archives clerks, holding dearly onto loose articles of clothing or your briefcase if you happened to carry such a piece of luggage, because the ventilation system perpetually; Supervisor had been wrong in saying the breakdown was temporary, though the force of the winds had been fixed down to thunderstorm-levels rather than gale. One could not fraternize with one’s co-workers during these minutes in the hallway over tea due to the inclement weather, and spent the time instead pressed flat like a beetle against the wall to avoid being blown away. Then the door would slam open and Supervisor would yell the name of the next man and drag him by the arm into the office as one by one the day’s assignments poured in from higher chains of command.
Within an hour, or at most seventy-five minutes, one found oneself curled up, lying down in a maggot shape little comma in the dumbwaiter. To discover a misplaced thoughtreel, the most common assignment for a novice, it was necessary first to recognize the wrong recording in the score: to detect the crinkle sound of that shirt earlier today doesn’t belong with the thoughtreel that gives us the sound of unleaded gasoline the first year of its wide introduction in the unnameable country with the adjacent precise recording of the football match. One crept along until homing in on the precise reel until it was possible to pluck out the mistake, before placing it in the right section.
On occasion, while he handled the roundmetal containers, Mamun Ben Jaloun felt dizzy. Other times he experienced strange effects that at first he interpreted as combinations of loneliness and the red-lit darkness of that vast subterranean library. The sounds would vibrate everything, the depths of his entrails. Then an almost-voice, a wilderness cry that disappeared almost as soon as it arose and returned him to the maze of sounds. In these short moments he felt like weeping from the gut. The transition from sensation to clear sound, the synthetic formation of stories: and truly, this did happen: my father began to feel over time what his wife had always sensed from afar and what he knew rationally to be a fact, namely that living minds were stored in the thoughtreels. At the exact moment of revelation he felt only fear, and trembled under pale sheets in his bed upon hurrying feverish home the first time a thoughtreel sang out to him without the aid of headphones plugged into a magnetic player.
Hark unto me, Mamun Ben Jaloun, for, like you, I too once had life. Recall: limp-handed cluttering to the floor, he had let drop the roundmetal container.
Cover me, he said to Shukriah, as the walls shivered. And she brought him another blanket because all the blood had left his extremities.
What happened, she asked.
I heard the angel of God speaking, Mamun replied.
Shukriah said that was blasphemy and held him tightly, asked again: Tell me what happened today, but Mamun just teeth-chattered. Recall he did not submit at once to the powers of his own understanding. He had never heard voices quite this way and was troubled about his mental health.
A question: did Shukriah not know the details of what terrified Mamun, or was she, by that time, lost mirror-mirror in my head, in the looking-glass world of her own suffering and solipsistic desires to eat silt among other desires. If the latter, then where does the culpritseeking blame-casting finger point: from the womb he would not allow their love to flow as the simple love between a man and a woman not only because he desired all his mother’s love but because through her he wanted to siphon all the love in the world.
In the Pits, as the Archives were known among the clerks, there were no friends and many wanderers, like Mamun, sent to gather the errant file that had not been listened to perhaps in twenty years because some higherup inspections agent at the Ministry of Records and Sources demanded. There were also rumours that the Archives hid a priestly caste of silent ghosts, who wandered searching furtively for the one file that would contain within it all the thoughtreels, an infinite and sacred document. It was said the Archives were in fact so vast that some employees had descended below and never ridden the dumbwaiter back up to the surface. Supposedly, they had managed to cultivate edible plants in the dim light because they knew which plumbing pipes to tap for clean water and even farmed rodents for food; they lived in solitude and total custodial devotion to the Archives. Some even claimed that these rogues played mischievous tricks on clerks, that in fact they were the ones who misplaced the files and forced the work onto their shoulders, but let me make clear that no one ever verified the existence of such a cult or discovered material evidence of their occult beliefs or the slightest proof of an infinite thoughtreel that contained all the reels. More common were the whistling ghosts, ordinary clerks who by sound warned others of their presence and reminded them of their discontented solitude. Of these, my father became acquainted with one Simon, a stooping melancholic who happened on occasion to arrive in the mornings at around the same time as Mamun.
After they happened to curl up into the dumbwaiter together several times, Mamun gathered up the courage to disclose the event of the singing reel, which had never repeated but which still sang in his head time to time: Has it ever happened to you, man.
We are keepers of dead souls, Simon shrugged, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these tin cans leapt at your throat or bit you.
When my father didn’t answer, Simon dropped a thoughtreel. Did you hear something, my father asked.
No, did you.
One day, Mamun M awoke gasping for breath, swimming out of a dream of Qismis, of whom he had not dreamed in many years. He dreamed that they were putting to bed a flock of children, who wandered pissing and laughing in a cauliflower patch, and that now, exhausted, they were about to retire to her bedroom and make love, but they never got beyond the first kiss, which was s
o long and which sucked so much air out of his lungs that Shukriah, bewildered, was forced to beat him on his back with the flat of her hand in order to restore his breathing, but still Mamun Ben Jaloun did not awaken and for several minutes spoke to her as his former lover.
At work, he wandered through the pitch markers, unable to find the reel of his search, a radio singer’s magnetic iteration of middle C that just wasn’t there, and not even the penlight could help him. He hummed a movie tune to reset his ears, drummed against his kneecaps, contrary to departmental regulations, which encouraged hushhushing all personal sounds, including the inadvertent gastrointestinal. Sometimes the sound of his hair growing oozed out of his forearms and scalp, while another time the sound of raisins hitting a metal bowl; the latter directed him to his restless life of women and song.
The Archives, which were generally cool due to their subterranean placement, had heated today to an unbearable degree, though it is true he had been warned by Supervisor that the boilers were malfunctioning and the whole building would be affected for the next several days. Mamun Ben Jaloun unbuttoned his shirt and took a large whiff of raw onions. He suspired the words orange blossoms without understanding their meaning. Unexpectedly, Mamun Ben Jaloun wanted nothing more than to strip nude and munch on raw onion after onion; from where did the hunger.
He arrived at a portion of the Archives where all the thoughtreels had tumbled off the shelves and lay in a pile like drying. Such disorder was so unnatural in the Archives that he forgot his assigned task and began replacing on the shelves one by one. His skin tingled as he touched the roundmetal containers. Then the dizziness again and Mamun placed his fingers into his ears for a moment and sang one pure note that resonated through the whole subterranean cavity. The dizziness passed and everything halted. Then he bent low to pick up the next reel and shone his penlight at the tag: Zachariah Ben Jaloun.
Hidden organs passed conflicting received messages inside Ben Jaloun the son. Recall he had discovered his father once earlier and had been enslaved by him. And recall Mamun Ben Jaloun had played so many roles in his life—motorcycle pirate wardrobe orderly street urchin playback singer cinematographer prisoner of a spider woman, now the husband of a former shepherdess and an Archives clerk—and had flowed from one to the next with such ease and thoughtlessness for the past, never imagining lost time as a violent break with the moving present, not forever gone and always enjoined to now by desire and memory, that, above all else, when the past returned as ghostly physical ailments he had begun to experience lately it filled him with fear, and with a greater curiosity to understand. He stiffened his back and turned behind him, then stared as far ahead as possible through the black fog, though he knew there was probably no one around for at least one hundred square metres, before hiding the thoughtreel under his shirt.
He hurried home, shivering from an elemental fever. Septillion reptilian scales and ashen hair: Mamun Ben Jaloun was drenched in his own perspiration. Cover me, he said to Shukriah through chattering teeth, and she did so.
Tell me what happened, she asked, touching his cool forehead with the back of a hand, then running her hands through his hair and rising ash up from his hair: a grey fog of ash covered the room and Shukriah began to cough and to choke. Bedridden by a fever that doctors could not detect and at the mercy of the bubblegum twins, who used the opportunity to assail him with inedible concoctions they called soup and with anecdotes and intrigues from their lives whose dramas were too complex for a feverish/even unfeverish mind to untangle, it took Shukriah three weeks to find the right magnetic tape player to play the reel, though she located it just down the street in Xasan Sierra’s cigarette shop. The vendor was unwilling to part with what he claimed was a family heirloom.
Too many dollars to buy, he said, and would not sell, but eventually agreed to rent it to her for one week.
Shukriah set up the instrument in their bedroom with the door firmly shut to block smells of the lizard soup the twins were cooking, and at first the sounds made no sense to her at all. They seemed like the effect of a voice refracted through a prism or a broken mirror. But Mamun Ben Jaloun recognized certain properties of rhythm that were not dissimilar to his own way of thinking. He played and replayed the reel until the week was over and then went shivering to Xasan Sierra himself, begging for another week’s extension, which the vendor reluctantly granted, but only after pawning off onto Mamun a carton of clove cigarettes and demanding an increase by twenty percent on the instrument’s rent.
So again, the squeal of the tape, let’s listen: blank verses in whispers trying to hide even from his listening ownmind the hereandthere thoughts everyday worries, flight of an opening stanza before the poem puts down feet, stamps out its meter, spreads out multiplies. Suddenly the who are you and why do you do, questions and repetitions, the cracks of the batons and the penetrations into/the rupture and the twisted desolate, the pitter-patter reminders only. Mamun Ben Jaloun is studying hard to understand the madness and disintegration of Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s mind, the transformation of the thinking person into a butcher-functionary: the thoughtreel illustrates the way each sentence of Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s thoughts initially functioned not unlike a mathematical set with one of its phrases (orange blossoms, for instance) behaving as a variable that would repeat the preceding verse.
There occurred two functions of the mind simultaneously, he noticed: one directly concerned with the world at large and the other internal and secret, doing the work of poetry. As is understandable, the tape was a fragment of the untenable infinity of the blank verses of Facsimile that Zachariah Ben Jaloun constantly rehearsed in his younger days while working at the British Intelligence Service in the Heart of Arabia, replaying them infinitely and growing heavier each day with a series-poem like none other in history, which was never published and which he could not commit to the page owing to a mysterious ailment that eventually rendered him illiterate. As it went on to reveal, the regression formula of Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s mind was disturbed through torture by the introduction of jagged rhythms white noise, until, as the second side of the thoughtreel, which Shukriah had accidentally played first, evinced, his mind would spontaneously attempt to make the same leaps, but found itself destroyed incapable; the tape stopped at around age thirty.
By the time Mamun Ben Jaloun understood the secret of his father’s thoughtreel and the history of his transformation, his elemental fever had more or less subsided, though his hair continued to smell like ash and would not return to its original crow’s hue but remained a smoky grey instead. He returned to the office with his furlough crumpled in his breast pocket and discovered that the wind had disappeared in the hallway, but that despite the better weather, still no one spoke while they waited in queue for their daily assignment. Supervisor accepted the slip of absence and said nothing, which indicated that he knew— though he did wrinkle his brow at his changed hair colour—and as the day proceeded, Mamun Ben Jaloun began to relax.
Is there life in the Archives. He doubted the myths of the ghosts and their search for the infinite reel. It seemed to him, forgetting for a moment the poetic specificity of Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s mind, that all the reels were the same in that they were all documents of suffering. A weightlessness began to infect his steps. Like Badsha Abd, he lost his footsteps; they no longer registered on the ground, as if his record on earth was already erased. New pains assailed his gut, and Supervisor warned that any more missed days would result in his termination. In a way, Mamun Ben Jaloun wished for nothing more, though the question how would the family persist were such an event, as well as imagining the drove of vultures just waiting to seize upon an opportunity to assume his ministry post, drove him to continue taking the dumbwaiter every day into the Archives.
One day, the dizziness, fevers, mental weaknesses, hallucinations, and his smoke and ashen hair were accompanied by bloody shit in the toilet. In the bathroom mirror he pulled his drum-taut cheeks and watched the thin wreaths of smoke rise from th
e tip of his skull, opened his ruined mouth full of loose teeth, and realized he was not yet forty but appeared and felt like an old man. Which hidden organ was failing inside. Would he remember his marriage night with death. Would he live on in the mirrors like certain ghosts of the city which failed to recognize they were dead. He located the beginnings of his illness in time and cursed the life of Zachariah Ben Jaloun and wished he had never known his father even in the fragments he had come to know him; he cursed his curiosity and his theft of the thoughtreel and burned it without a thought or ritual inside their tiny flat while Shukriah screamed and tore out hair and mourned as if he was committing murder. He raved that his mother had loved him and he had abandoned her without a thought, did not even bother to seek her out after escaping his shackled life in his father’s office wardrobe; what cobwebbed reality did she exist in he would never know.
He lamented thus, endlessly for two whole days and so selfobsessed had he become that Shukriah, who had for the last year been emerging slowly out of the solipsism of her extended pregnancy, finally returned fire and berated him for not noticing he was not a child to be thinking all the time about parentsandyourbloodypast, let me remind that I too have a history and they (meaning us, writer reader et al) don’t know a damn thing about this, and in fact, Mamun Ben Jaloun, referring to him by his original and full name, there are two growing children in our home and your years of neglect have inflicted such damage that she did not have the heart to finish this sentence.
And how will it be, Allah, when the other one, she referred to Hedayatesque, slapped her forehead. I am dying, Shukriah, he said, in front of Reshma and Chaya, who had never seen them fight and were astounded by the revelation and began to weep. Not emerging for a second out of his hermit crab’s shell, he retained the upper hand.