by Ghalib Islam
Now what. For more than a single reason, Zachariah Ben Janoun wanted to strip naked and weep, eating raw onion after onion and bury himself in the verses of E.E. Cummings. How did one leave this place. He stepped back and the walls fluttered in a slight breeze. His body did it everywhere, limbs chest head and all tiny tremors. He put his back against the wall near the door and sat utterly defeated. After a very long time, he heard a whistle in the distance and the animals, he heard, responded to it with their quick gait. It was safe to go, he imagined.
ASSEMBLERS AND COLLECTORS
Zachariah Ben Janoun watched the assembly of a magnetic tape of recorded thoughts. He had come prepared with a notebook and pen, but his supervisor insisted that junior members of Department 6119 never write anything; all employees were required to memorize, and to communicate in spoken language only.
Zachariah breathed a sigh of relief because he could barely read anymore; he had spent another restless night, this one roving from book to book, convincing himself he was reading The Enormous Room but knowing it was a delusion, as it was only because he knew all the verses by heart that the letters supplied meaning. Lesser-known works were more difficult to decipher, while the newspaper would have been impossible without looking at the photographs of presidents kissing babies, crowning pageant queens, or generals receiving orders of valour. He sighed as he bit into an onion, though he was far less lachrymose tonight, he noticed: one spends a lifetime gathering knowledge and is rendered an invalid in a day.
The supervisor showed him the tools of his new craft: a pair of scissors, a sharp putty knife, two reels, a tape machine that spun them, and large headphones, like those in Collections. One had to be careful and wear latex gloves when handling the magnetic tape, because the tiniest scratch could delete an important word or sound and jeopardize the case against a terror suspect. In the future, the supervisor informed, we will be able to tune in to images of the mind as well, but for the moment, we must be content simply to trespass on sounds. The job for novices like Zachariah Ben Janoun was to determine the primary speaking voice of a thoughtreel, the monologist or subject. Minds are extremely varied, heterogeneous within the same person depending on time and mood, he was told, sometimes secondary voices intercede, and with experience, one learns deftly to sift out the thoughts of a schizophrenic or the return of an old memory in a healthy mind, among other
Zachariah’s mind left the conversation, wandered corymb-stalks of hallways he had caught whispers of on his way to the office with Supervisor. While Assembly is closer to the Governor’s judgment, he tuned back to the speaker, thus higher up the bureaucratic staves, Supervisor was explaining, it is, in fact, a less challenging department in terms of the difficulty of individual tasks and the average length of time required for learning the required functions. Thus, it was not uncommon for employees of the Assembly Subdivision to be demoted, so to speak, to Collections if they were felt to excel at their work here. Zachariah Ben Janoun somehow preferred the darker atmosphere of this place to Collections, but the thought of those grey eyes released some scent into the air that intoxicated him. He must try to speak with her.
For the first hour while trying to identify key characteristics of the subject of a practice reel, he was in awe: could it be, he wondered, is this how far we have come in the black arts. It was at once a privilege and a godly perverse pleasure to experience another human being’s thoughts so closely. How different a language, he gathered at once, than mere words. Many interruptions, he noted, rarely full sentences, buzzing and humming, impressions of what seemed like the person’s surrounding environment, renditions of popular songs with incorrect lyrics, but he found it quite easy to identify the primary voice: male, thirties to early forties, educated, middle class in taste, a native Arabic speaker. On occasion, the dials slipped and the machines dug deeper, the Collections headphones caught cry and cackles inner screams of minds honed in to an unnameable suffering, the same vision of the future fire burning relentlessly backward in time.
Well, then, his supervisor peered over his shoulder from above, his shadow blocking sight of everything in the room, have we come to any conclusions.
Yes, Zachariah Ben Janoun reported his opinions with some hesitation. The supervisor listened, his face inscrutable in the darkness he cast. Soon, the darkness went away and Zachariah could see the room again, the back of his supervisor growing smaller, weaving among the workstations and into the dark back room.
There appeared before Zachariah several other reels, two, four, seven in total. Please review each of these, he was told, preferably before the day’s end. What had he done, Zachariah Ben Janoun wondered, was this punishment or simply an extended portion of the interview. Since he was never informed whether his first day had begun, whether he had been hired at all, he realized he didn’t know when it ended.
And there is still time, Zachariah Ben Jaloun, you can simply refuse to continue, walk through the arid outer corridor with a song in your throat instead, take a bite out of one of the guard dog bullmastiffs outside if need be and perhaps the written word will come back to you by the time you reach home. But our hero pays no mind, too busy deciphering the reels.
The second tape is more challenging because it is evident the collector had difficulty locating the correct frequency. Thoughts appear-disappear into-outof the maze of AM radio sports programs and news broadcasts, though it is a woman, he is sure, whom they are after, young, whose mind repeats melancholic phrases of loss, fearful worries, and indications she realizes they are listening.
He stops the reel and unhooks it from the set, rubs his temples. An onion right now would be the cure. Someone taps his shoulder and he jolts up with a start.
Lunch, she says, and Zachariah Ben Janoun follows the trail of ants toward the sugar. In a vast room like a church hall. A shapeless voiceless din. All are eating, no one speaks. All appear to be strangers and everyone is dressed in the same matte grey and blue. His white shirt, starched bright, shines out like an incandescent bulb, and he vows to replace it at the earliest convenience. He opens his sack and retrieves a roundmetal container of rice, vegetables, and a few bits of meat. An unpeeled onion stares at him from the bag bottom, but he knows its odour would be offensive to his colleagues, especially without his bottle of alcohol rinse. He picks at his food as time moves as it does.
A whole day passes and twenty-four hours later we find Zachariah Ben Janoun at a similar table, surrounded by strangers, on this occasion looking up from his meal from time to time in hopes of spotting the woman with the grey eyes, but in such a nameless vast crowd how can he find her. The weeks pass and the reels increase in difficulty, often he does not know when one person’s thoughts end and another’s begin, the voices, especially of friends or family members, he presumes, often bear similar frequencies and are difficult to set apart. Ill informed of the nuances of the craft, he interrupts his neighbour from time to time for his opinion and is greeted with hostility.
Can’t you tell this is she daydreaming of her lover, and his voice is in fact her imagination.
But how can it be so exact, so extended, Zachariah asks, I thought it was a schizophrenic dialogue.
Don’t be stupid, those are rarer than you think, and sometimes collectors will even tune in to one or two crazies just to make our jobs more difficult.
Really.
Who knows, his neighbour returns to his own workstation and resets his headphones. Zachariah Ben Janoun rewinds and listens and cuts and glues as best as he can, but since his efforts receive no feedback from the supervisor, he does not know whether his performance is satisfactory.
After work, he finds himself led along the same ant-trail out of the building, and at home he is anaesthetized by the silence, unable to write or to read, consuming onions, as usual, but gradually weeping less and less.
Despite changes in his life, Zachariah Ben Jaloun keeps some of his old habits, the small standalone café still reserves his spot at the corner table, and on some afternoons
, by the dying light of day, he comes here with the same books and the new ones he can now buy with the added salary, in hopes of a miracle, but none finds him. His thoughts circumambulate the same grey eyes and he wonders if it would be possible to manufacture a chance encounter with their beholder.
Taps on the shoulder di-di-dit. You did not write or wire me, the professor says, and Zachariah must admit this is true, but provides no explanation.
Come tonight at least to my flat.
Another of your gatherings.
Yes, I’ve been singing your praises to every publisher in the country, some of them should be present this evening, so if you bring a sample of your most recent work.
Run, Zachariah Ben Janoun, out of the café and into your room, hide between the indecipherable pages until you are forgotten as Ben Jaloun the minor poet. Were you not wondering, just months ago, how to smash rocks through the windows of your few readers, to repossess your words; have you found a way out of danger so soon. And yet at the moment the author of Orange Blossoms feels nothing but pride for his minor success and a whetted appetite and loosened tongue.
Yes, I have been working on a, how should I put it, a rather epic poem; perhaps I’ll recite a fragment sometime.
Professor is delighted and rebukes him again for having been out of touch, we had two contemporary poetry classes in my undergraduate seminar, you would have been a perfect guest. But tonight, he says, and they shake hands.
For a long time Zachariah Ben Jaloun wanders in his thoughts, dispirited, defeated. The Ben Janoun in him disapproves like a father or a shadow. Impossible, it undulates, interrupts, disturbs: recite it but no flying meter and skeleton, rhyme and sand to the typist, and besides, I am Zachariah Ben Janoun to Department 6119, and in the official records I am not Ben Jaloun, but they will find you anyway. Perhaps the double identity kissing teeth and mocking laugh, the difference of a single letter, is a sufficient shell under which to hide.
He is still wrestling with these shadows during the taxi ride to the professor’s home, I have done nothing thus far in my new job, I have acted as a model employee, I have broken no laws, and to harbour minor literary ambitions is not a crime. And yet, he knew from experience, from friends who had suffered and those in the newspapers who had never returned once captured, whose names were mentioned in an advertisement in the back, perhaps, but never even in the opinions section let alone news articles, that one need not commit a crime to be twisted into an urn or blown into wreaths of smoke: the unnameable country did not take chances with its young, they were either institutionalized or vanquished. But there were more people at the gathering than the previous time. The professor greeted him joyously, with a ready wine glass, and Zachariah Ben Jaloun refilled it to the brim several times, making the rounds with his friend and fitting easily into the role of a rising star.
When the occasion arose to meet Benjamin Pasha, the owner of a prominent publishing house, with distribution capacity in Europe and Africa, Zachariah started with a terse, most difficult portion of the blank verses, one he had revised many times and for which he had suffered greatly, and did not realize when the room fell silent. He continued out of the sheer thrill of revealing the lines to human company, and when he stopped at the second stanza he was urged to continue. Shy in nature, he knew if he thought of anything now but the blue-throated vase in his line of sight, he would lose the poem, so he went on and on until he failed to remember what came next, at which point he invented a couplet to end the performance. The room stayed silent.
What do you call it, Benjamin Pasha asked.
Facsimile, Zachariah said without thinking.
It’s very modern, elegant, the publisher noted, leave a fresh draft at the front desk and I’ll see to it someone takes a look at the first opportunity.
For the remainder of the evening he swam in the delight of academic criticism from the professor’s colleagues: watch your foot, young man, meter and rhyme, have you read Hart Crane, you would do well to study him, and blind appreciation what freshness, just what the movement and our generation needs.
The professor took him aside and spoke at length about the nature of the larger publishing houses, what he should be careful of and what to expect, but as Zachariah nodded thoughtfully he was thinking only that he had defeated Ben Janoun; the shadow had nothing further to say.
In the coming month, he was too wrought up in the task of completing the blank verses and ensuring their assiduous transcription to care for the particulars of his work. His neighbours noticed the change: he whistled as he cut magnetic tape, asked for directions less often, chomped on raw onions at lunch, sang as he gargled with alcohol rinse in the bathroom, accidentally wore bright shirts, looked this way and that as if searching for a face, and spoke with more confidence than usual when reporting his tapereel conclusions to the supervisor.
Fear, he decided, was their chief governing principle. It was meant to make you want less, to efface the past and to tether the imagination so no future but theirs could be loosened into the world. It taught you how to tighten your own rope so the neck would bear not marks. And censorship, though an official Lawful Publications Committee did exist, was more often self-censorship than the truncheon. True, abject violence and state terror did exist, but so forth.
The meaning of the magnetic tapes escaped him. He no longer thought of them as recorded minds but simply as sounds, puzzles to be deciphered. What mattered was to publish, to live as freely as one could, and eventually to die. That was all. But to die before dying, to live in one’s throat like it was an unused rusted pipe, never truly to speak, was much worse.
Zachariah Ben Jaloun got by with maxims, but fear revisited him the day the supervisor stood over his desk, his face masked by his own shadow. He toyed with Zachariah’s putty knife. You have been summoned by the deputy chief of the subdivision.
May I ask why.
One never asks why.
Hot lunar dust flew in his face and choked him as he passed several employees while travelling to the deputy chief’s office on the sixth floor, for whom the wind blew in the opposite direction. A margay or an ocelot pounced by. The appropriate room never arrived. When it did, he was not ready. The man at the desk was overtaken with work. His face hung low with heavy jowls and Zachariah realized he was envious of all the papers before the deputy chief of the subdivision. If only he was able to read even a trite memorandum.
Zachariah Ben Janoun, the man spoke without looking up.
Yes, sir.
You are an assembler, is this correct.
Correct, sir.
Your supervisor tells me you have a penchant for the craft of recognizing voices, of separating meaningful dangerous iterations of the mind from nonsense.
Zachariah did not respond.
Is this correct.
I have not received any feedback on my work, sir, and could not say one way or another.
Good, the deputy chief looked up, for it had been the right response. We would like to offer you a junior supervisory role in Collections due to these bright spots in your résumé; we think you would do well to shepherd the flock.
Sir.
Yes, Ben Janoun.
I have no experience locating the correct frequencies of suspect minds. When I listen to the reels, I discover even a good collection will contain many errors and stray into the public broadcast stream. I am nervous to direct others in what appears to me a very difficult task.
The deputy chief sighed as one does when a bright child makes an asinine comment. Did you have any experience sorting the right voices and editing magnetic tapes into potential terror cases.
No, sir.
What makes you think we wouldn’t provide you with sufficient training to perform your job in Collections.
Zachariah felt foolish, and dizzy from looking at all the papers on the large desk.
And another thing, Ben Janoun.
Yes, sir.
Watch your foot.
Sir. Zachariah’s en
trails froze: did he know.
There are loose tiles is what I mean, the construction crews have been making repairs all week, you have no doubt noticed all the dust in the hallway.
Yes, sir.
Good day, Ben Janoun.
Zachariah wanders the corridors, pulling on doorhandles, screaming high and grinding his bones into the walls, let me out I have been here for a century. He puts his head low to the ground and listens for a thread. Low voices. Vibrato. A beautiful chorus part in the distance. He lifts up his head just as a sword is about to lop off.
He awakes with a start. His bed is drenched with perspiration. The putrefaction of onionskin. The smell of burnt coffee beans. The dark shape of silent books. What happens if one wants to resign from the Ministry of Radio and Communications. Undoubtedly there results a complex bureaucratic process, several periods of interrogation and bullying, signatures on page after page confirming one will not reveal— no, that one is unaware of—departmental secrets if one gets so far, and probably then the intense surveillance for years after being granted dismissal. There is only one direction in the maze. Time only flows toward greater disorder. And yet there remained on Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s bitter breath a lingering taste of the future, something beautifully grey that succoured all the alien dust and desert corridors, but he could not quite recall its name. Perhaps it had never possessed one.
So far she has only been referred to as the woman with the grey eyes. Time has come for us to set down Zachariah Ben Jaloun. Let us leave him to his solitude of the inscrutable page, to think through his decision to hatch the blank verses and to wonder about his future within the hallways and rooms of Department 6119. In his absence, and perhaps even in his presence, as time will tell, Grey Eyes, I claim, is the onetrue hero—or heroine if you prefer—of this story. (Her name, therefore, warrants revelation.) My father (or the man the story makes me call my father) would probably insist on the following version of things: the only reason to mention Zachariah Ben Jaloun at all is because he leads us to his mother, the woman with the grey eyes, my perhaps-grandmother. So many possible genealogies, birthparents, foster homes, prison wards, faulty endings, and halfway-voltefaces. Let’s see, where to start, then: the tale of my young grandmother and her mistress of the many shoes is as fine a place as any.