by Ghalib Islam
I know what is written there, he said, you merely have to walk down the first hallway until the end, go up the stairs between the third and sixth floors, and you will find the station you are searching.
Station.
Yes, man, and don’t go jawing about repeating their words, they’ll take offence and then you will really be in trouble.
Zachariah Ben Jaloun stepped over the massive dogs. He had trouble pushing open the heavy door and felt embarrassed, pulled the handle, but that did no good either.
Here, let me, the little man said, and easily pushed it open with his good arm and hidden strength.
Zachariah Ben Jaloun muttered thanks and walked into an arid windy corridor that extended into the distance. In the far distance there was a faint light. There was no one else in the hallway and he walked alone in silence save for the sounds of his shoes against the floor, clutching his tie, which fluttered like a disembodied tongue. He walked and his steps echoed against the high ceilings. It took a long time for him to reach the stairs and then he had to decide whether to take the elevator adjacent to the stairwell. He decided against it, thinking it better to follow Withered Arm’s instructions as closely as possible. He rose up the steps and decided on the third floor as where he should like to arrive. There he noticed only one other man, a young man like himself awaiting his turn in a mercilessly hot room with plastic chairs and a bespectacled woman seated behind a desk shuffling through papers. A caged mynah hung in the corner.
Zachariah took his seat after confirming the time of his appointment with the receptionist, taking little notice of the other man in the space. He was forced to wait a very long time. Hunger, thirst, the erratic predictable flight of a drosophila, the cries of the black bird, the itching of a welt on his right ankle from shoes of slightly incorrect size.
Ben Janoun, the woman called out, and Zachariah resisted the urge. Surely it was the other man who possessed that name and he would assume his spot, but since he did not, Zachariah wondered whether the woman was simply mispronouncing. Ben Janoun, she repeated.
Yes, I am he, Zachariah’s mouth decided to take the chance, and his feet leapt up. Room 6119, she handed him a slip of paper on which there was written some inscrutable text beside the twisted number.
Zachariah Ben Jaloun focused unfocused his eyes, turned it upside down, but still the letters failed to reveal meaning. The more he tried the more he drowned in nausea. At first writing and now reading as well. Either I am going mad, he thought, or this is truly the loss of the written word. When he knocked on the indicated door, he received no reply. Though it was insensible to enter a room into which he was not invited, he tried the handle and found it locked. Without recourse he walked down the hallway and found to his surprise other doors also marked 6119. Well, which one, he laughed, and stopped in front of a random.
Yes, a voice from within.
At least something, he said softly, and went inside.
An ordinary moonfaced man with not a follicle of hair on his face or on the top of his skull, with long, feminine eyelashes, sat behind a large desk.
I’m Zachariah Ben Jaloun, and I’ve come here for a.
Ben Jaloun.
Yes, that’s right.
No, we didn’t call for a Ben Jaloun, you must mean Ben Janoun.
I see.
Are you Ben Janoun.
And Zachariah again had the opportunity to correct the mistake and save himself from the dispirited future that awaited him within the walls of this evil edifice, whose history he was not yet bound to shape. Once more, however, he chose to assume the mask of the other, this Ben Janoun. I am he, Zachariah said softly.
The man said good, then go down to the end of this hallway and make a left and knock on the second door of the second wing of the 6119 Department, in which you will find a man who looks like me, but who is, in fact, my brother. He will lead you through the rest of the interview process.
You mean the interview has already begun.
Yes, said the bald man with long eyelashes.
I am Zachariah Ben Janoun, he announced himself, and a man nearly identical to the one he had just encountered pointed him to the plush leather chair over there reminded him of the cushions in the professor’s house, though these were a drab brown.
Would you like a hot drink, tea possibly. And without waiting for Zachariah’s answer he muttered something imperceptible and a full-grown man sprang open the doors of a large chest of drawers behind the chair, barrelled and out, excuse me pardonsorrysir, nearly tripping over the long coattails of his jacket streaming behind him, with a steaming hot receptacle, handing Zachariah a saucer and a cup.
Zachariah held the cup and could not help but wince as several boiling droplets of fluid struck his hand as the man poured.
Manu, Ordinary Man Two shouted, and began rebuking the waiter with such ire.
Zachariah Ben Jaloun, or Ben Janoun shall we say, for we had better start getting used to this new name, better sooner than later, felt a great need to defend, my very fault, sir, I shifted position in my seat and so forth.
Very well, Ordinary Man Two glared, and sniffled di-dit, as if that were an indication for the servant to return to his wardrobe.
Does he live there, asked Zachariah.
In a manner of speaking, as a hermit crab lives in his shell. And no further speech passed regarding the waiter or the wardrobe. But throughout the interview, Zachariah Ben Janoun was forced to ignore a weeping whimpering scratching sound like a neglected dog emerging from inside the furniture.
Ordinary Man the Second began to read from a page before him. Zachariah Ben Janoun. Five years’ experience in the infantry along the Somali border. Rise to Major in two years excellent. Associated with Black Organs in retrieving information through expert knowledge of Arabic, Amhari, and Quinceyenglish. Received the Order of New Jerusalem at age twenty-seven, Ordinary Man the Second looked up from the paper with an intense glare of respect.
At any point Zachariah could have interrupted, screamed out, no I am not these things, none of the individual facts and certainly not the composite hero you are describing, I am a minor poet only, no Ben Janoun but Zachariah Ben Jaloun, a quite happy man when reading E.E. Cummings naked alone and lying with a kindly washergirl several times a month, though I do not prefer her as much as the woman with the sleepy eyes I met once and more so another, whom also I have seen also on one occasion, a woman with grey eyes, who, though I have not thought of it until this moment, may be the source of a literary constipation the likes of which no human being should have to experience, and which brings me to my real question: why is orthography the source of nausea and vertigo for me now when it has always et cetera, and to continue I would say only that I am here for a job in the junior infantry position, hopefully one that allows me much time outdoors to think and to surreptitiously scrawl poems and marginalia into a notebook that may one day be transformed into another published slim volume, I know I will never be a great poet, but have you ever consumed a raw onion, there is no sweeter poetry than a cold unpeeled raw onion between one’s teeth, Sir, I would only like to live inside the womb of language and to eat the light of dusk my whole life, indeed these are my true desires.
But Zachariah Ben Janoun said none of these things and assumed the mask of a valorous past, learned swiftly that as Zachariah Ben Janoun, he had never hunched his shoulders and had known how to defeat an enemy with a glare, to note slight changes in an enemy’s psychological patterns, to destroy his familial ties and poison his friends against him, how to frame any words he has ever written in order to prevent him ever from writing again if he is a dissenting writer, and if he is a carpenter, how to turn his hands against him, how to make him feel his craft is ugly, his head is a shameful pot of lies, how to do these things and more to hammer to harm to harm to harm. Why, Zachariah Ben Jaloun. And yet no one would ever know himself.
Welcome to the Ministry of Radio and Communications, the ordinary man welcomed him with a clammy handsh
ake. We are honoured to have such a decorated member join Department 6119. While as major you were no doubt informed of some of the inner workings of the Ministry of Radio and Communications, the affairs within these walls are of a deeply secret nature and much more complex; please allow me to give you a brief tour.
While they turn onto another echoing hallway, which leads them to the correct room, allow me, friends and enemies, to provide you a brief history of Department 6119. What is Department 6119. And what do they say of Department 6119. Recall the untold history: many years earlier, John Quincy, oldhaggard and bedridden with boils all over his skin, not from some plague but a gruesome infection of lovesickness, is haunted by what he believes is the kidnapping of his wife, Caroline Margarita. In search of a palliative, he turns the dial of his bedside radio for some music or news or dramatic performance and lands on an in-between frequency only to discover strange electrostatic oscillations and the faint monomaniacal voice of a person speaking to himself: not an outer voice but an inner, a human mind, he is sure, and belonging to someone, no less, that he recognizes from the days of his military service. Recall, as it is said: he throws back the sheets and gathers his, rings the bedside bell, and then a wild cry Bovaire Bovaire, he calls, the British have landed.
The doctor is astonished: he himself is one of the few to know and was informed only an hour earlier, how on earth could Quincy have realized. Against the Maroons and during John Quincy’s short rule following the insurgency the discovery of this alternate use of radio— which Bovaire called a natural extension of the instrument, since the mind, too, is merely the collection intersection interaction of waves— was not developed into systematic information gathering or intelligence. Quincy seemed the only one capable of manipulating an ordinary shortwave radio to pick up on the insights of a faraway unsuspecting mind. And even for him it was an inaccurate art, since most often he had no clue on whose thoughts he was trespassing. Others denounced the whole scientific basis of the endeavour and declared it as nothing more than the evanescent loony business of a pirate emperor who was fading day by day into the unreality of bhakti, of worshipping his dead mannequin wife.
Juan Baltazar, however, always fascinated by everything Quincy did, and who never lost faith in his predecessor, even when the other went mad and was said to have become a ghost, supposedly haunting the countryside of the continent, insisted on the recruitment of radio operators who would be able to spy on thoughts. Only one in every two thousand of those tested had some satisfactory ability to perform the operation, but slowly, during Baltazar’s tenure as governor of the unnameable country, a small department furtively grew, and was eventually added as an arm of the British Intelligence Service in the Heart of Arabia (BISHA).
While the problem of whose thoughts exactly appeared over the airwaves on each occasion was never successfully solved, information sharing between the various branches of BISHA reduced it somewhat, and the clean smokeless rooms—Department 6119 always kept a pious atmosphere, and many activities, including cigarette-smoking, had been banned from the start—filled with keen, dog-eared radio operators that rose up to successfully defend against large drug trafficking attempts, coups d’état, and, once, even against an external invasion. Or so it was said. Arrests of suspects led inevitably to torture but often revealed nothing, or revealed the recorded thoughts as nothing more than a passing fancy or technological errors resulting in misinterpretation: no, a criminal would insist, even under great suffering, that thought interrupted by reel static is thought of film recollection plus conversation about recent plosive events with friend.
But the department was never abolished for an important reason. In fact, its Wall of Red is more important now since the fall of communism, more important than ever because now is terrorism and still features taped-up Polaroid faces of sports heroes, actors, directors, writers, schoolteachers, volunteers: could be anybody, your local anything. Do this: first discover cracks in a red life, what department hacks joke about as the AIDS Narrative (he has AIDS, he fucked his, stole from, was late for, never did his homework when) before driving this virus silent into the community with the instruction be quiet and very loud while saying it because there is more about him. Until: drive the infected individual running crying confused to motherfriend, incorporate him weakened shivering back into the folds of the unnameable country. Finally: pat yourself on the back with the knowledge you can defend yourself against any threat, movie star, terrorist, whatever, and even more important, that you can bristle all the backs of the unnameable country at once and coordinate everyone twenty-four hours and fearful proper. In short, Department 6119 was important because it knifestruck fear deep into the heart of the general populace of not only the unnameable country but throughout the continent and beyond, as rumours spread wildly and some claimed that 6119 now had the capacity to spy on everyone’s thoughts and that it was impossible to know who was not 6119, who was or was not being targeted used for. A nimbus cloud settled over our mood and has since governed all our conversations and daily exchanges.
Down the hall and to the right, second room on the left. An enormous room divided and subdivided into cubicles. A deep hum in his intestines and the occasional squeal of a radio dial heard through the headphones of an operator. Hundreds, countless operators.
Is this all of them, Zachariah asked.
The bald man laughed, No, there are many other rooms. This is one room of Collections Subdivision, the largest of three subdepartments, whose purpose you know to some degree, though its functions are more nuanced as you will come to learn with time.
Then there is Assembly, his companion explained, in which the thoughtreels are cut and glued to order the thoughts of a single criminal (since one thoughtreel, due to the inaccuracy of the initial and subsequent locating processes, could contain impressions of the mind of more than a single individual, and, in fact, this was where mistakes were common, he did not reveal). After that authority passes on to Inspection, which edits and corrects any errors made by Assembly and decides whether to continue monitoring a suspect or to order an arrest. Ultimately, however, it is the executive council of the Governor’s office that determines the length of interrogations after receiving a report from BISHA, whose hierarchies play decisive roles in determining the case outcomes.
Zachariah Ben Janoun shivered, recalled his volume of poetry and how it had inspired rebellious nationalist political debates among the professor and his friends, realized that if suspected, one was stripped of all possessions, and more than anything that meant the extraction and cauterization of memory itself; torture could do that, it was the point of torture to claw to penetrate so deeply inside. That his unwritten blank verses might contain dissident opinions, unbeknownst to the author, filled him with dread; he needed to forget them immediately but how. Equally, perhaps more important, he needed to retrieve all copies of Orange Blossoms, and decided at once he would contact the publisher, the small bookstores where they were sold, and track down each of their owners, smash rocks through windows, to steal them back if need be. Perhaps Department 6119 was simply teasing him, showing him the blade the night before the act of qurbanor ritual sacrifice. He had never heard of such a nefarious roundabout way of capturing a potential terrorist, but fear gnawed at his entrails and suddenly all the onions and coffee from the previous night twisted inside and he needed badly to shit. But he tightened his continence and silenced his crowding thoughts.
As they passed through the maze of cubicles he was met with the bedraggled sidereal glances of so many individuals that he lost count of their souls or what miseries might rule their daily lives. He had heard that the suicide rate of radio operators was very high, and could imagine many asphyxiating reasons. But then a gaze leapt out of that atmosphere. It was her, the woman with the grey eyes whom he had seen but once at a border crossing while wrapped up in his own song. She didn’t look at him so much as through him, to some other time or distant location, and it was a quick glance before she returned to h
er dial. But as he and the man passed her cubicle, Zachariah Ben Janoun noted her posture, the curvature of her spine, the colour of her neck peering out of an ordinary cream-coloured blouse, and his curiosity was heightened, his blood rushed through vessels, and in an instant, he imagined several possible bright futures. He wondered if some operator or another, dialing through the infinite frequencies, was able to catch his mind at that moment, but he doubted it very much, and anyway what he felt was hardly a crime.
The other departments, the man was saying, as they turned around and followed a complex route out of Collections Subdivision 1, which did not involve a second encounter with the woman, who will be known to you in time, if you will excuse me, he said as they returned to the hallway, I have several important tasks to complete before tomorrow and I’ll attend to them now, and he scurried away with surprising haste. The job begins tomorrow at eight-thirty sharp, he spoke over his shoulder, and his echo faded to a near whisper with the increasing distance, report to the Assembly Department on the ninth floor and they will show you to your workstation.
Zachariah Ben Janoun found himself alone in the hallway and without a way out. There had been no time to ask. The only directions he had noticed in the whole facility were located on a plaque that hung in the front foyer before the first hallway prior to the staircase adjacent to the elevator, useless to him presently. He was exhausted from the events of the day, and had not realized from all the excitement and novelty how much this building drained him of half his blood. He felt so weak he wanted to lie down in the deserted hallway for a moment, only a moment, and to close his eyes. The twists and turns and strange echoes. When he finally saw the front door at the far corner of the arid first corridor, he inwardly rejoiced. When he put a shoulder against its heavy body, however, he felt the impact of a large animal against the wood and a sound like a panther’s growl. The bullmastiffs. They barked viciously. How could he have forgotten.