by Ghalib Islam
And what was I doing then. Nothing, mind you, except trying to tease out Q’s impish smile. A game, why not, I clapped, and just how the light of her face. How so. Why take the pepper shaker, right or left hand is irrelevant, and place into the opposite hand, where the thumb meets the forefinger: and I poured out just a few grains, and like snuff, I raised it to my nostrils, you sniff. I had meant the funny, nothing more than to send her bubbling into laughter, and I had succeeded.
Again, she pleaded after both our tears subsided and I had finished mopping up the snot from my nostrils.
So I performed the trick again and this time her explosive laugh interrupted a karaoke artist’s well-practised rendition of a popular tune that was breaking a lot of hearts at that time. Anger from the stage, of course, since the waves reverberated across three city blocks and continued hic for so hic long, with her intermittent addition of hiccups, that eventually it truncated the performance. But bemusement also, as the eavesdroppers’ spotlight struck us from every other angle of the establishment. An odd applause found us, for her laughter, possibly, and for what I did to cause it.
I knew Q was speaking then, but I was sneezing and swimming in a mucoid and black pulmonary sea, and it was not good then. Deeply perturbing: surely you know the ordinary effects of black pepper from dinner accidents, but its effect on Hedayat was nothing short of revelatory. Understand that when black pepper is inhaled under certain conditions, the experience is not unlike that of hashish at first draw, with its racing heart and perspiring palms. But then one’s tongue begins to drag like a hard drinker’s two A.M., and the black pepper junky talk is anything but parrotspeech lingua mirari, its effect singular, individuated.
At that moment, no one dared karaoke, when what emerged out of Hedayat was an owlish woot. Q no doubt interpreted this as a continuation of my performance, and it signalled her continuation of thunderous laughter and I, too, was trying, hooting and cooing and doing all the screeching inimitable by human speech organs.
But know the animal transformation was exactly involuntary. The only glossolalist inspiration for the moment I can recall is having gazed at an early framed portrait of the Madam meeting with a high-level American dignitary in some far peripheral corner while snorting a little, and it splintered my thoughts. I slipped into a baffling avian tongue, which was trying desperately to explain, and fell deep into the earthquake of Q’s laughter, which was far louder and bolder than mine had been during the spilling stones of Masoud Rana on the jetty, until her sounds became indistinguishable because the whole room was also laughing.
Here, let’s, she grabbed hold of the shaker after I had stopped momentarily to drink whatever was in the glass before me. I’ll see now, she did it, and disappeared into a grey cloud of dust from which she emerged with a bewildered scream; at first I was certain something vital in her had been destroyed. But after the confusion of the initial hit she sank into her nose and gave up a language of buzzing and clear crystalline nasal, and her throat was going so much then; I can recall it was the throat gristle and music then, not laughter. The more Q tried to refine her speech the more it resembled the beggar’s cant of a common mosquito.
From across the table, I hooted back my replies as the Doubly crowd gathered around us, too curious a performance for anyone to miss. And what a performance. The cross-species pidgin of an owl and a mosquito cannot exactly be translated, but let me say it convinced them and they wanted to do it as well.
Then all the pepper shakers were dumping and the grey light of the tea bar shone weakly, and in the twisted light the people became like the sounds inspired in them by blowing a little pepper. The hair of the barber with his straight razor still in his pocket was now a kookaburra’s crown, and for a time he strode from table to table on hidden wings, calling to this person and warbling to another, whatever hairs I cut are also sheared from my head and the whiskers on my face, he promised, but since he spoke in a pepper-inspired bird’s babble, it was difficult for others to understand him.
Then a man’s nose truncated, by which I mean the opposite, it stretched five aardvark times longer, in fact, and allowed him to search and suck up all the ants of the dirt underfoot. So solemnly he performed his task, as if he had been doing it all his life, with such little notice for his surroundings that when the kookaburra barber tripped over his ankles, he was glad to have been awakened, and yelled, enraged, how weary I am of this scuttling feast.
There were dogs then, how many so many dogs to emerge from the black cloud of sneezes and to meet the world with great barking and unyielding clamour, leashed dogs of the unnameable country, who played humans playing dogs in their muzzled everyday, but understand it was not only animals, for as well there were those who began humming and beeping like machines; there was an office lady who spoke only in alphanumeric configurations reminiscent of the lottery codes, and who after pronouncing each character would slap her own face, and another who chattered dit-dahs at the appropriate, repeated between grimaced teeth, not unlike John Quincy when he awoke from his great dream of Samuel Morse many years earlier.
It was difficult to know whether the hallucinations were theirs or belonged to us, whether we were peering into their minds or they were inside ours. The light twisted again and the jukebox started up on its own and spun a rousing dance number whose name had been lost in time.
That was when Hedayat stumbled into smoke, spun once, coughed a bunch as dells, torrents, flows and swift down both eyeballs cheeks flittering eyelids: a dense mist, another time, another light and heat: perspiring arms touched out of invisibility desiccated limbs levers or skeletons emerged, and hats, cloaks, ears, fluttering throats demanded attention/ Q, Hedayat cried out. Why, he asked the mist, but she was nowhere, remained nothing in only the mist. Fire in the unnameable country, what are you. Hedayat knew nothing about those pepper-inspired glossolalist visions and stumbled out of the struggling huddle into cooler streets. He turned a corner into a group of children crowded around, betting actual coinage on a chess match in which black had sent a knight errant to the furthest kingdoms of the board and white had just castled in front of an awaiting bishop. Excuse me, he asked one child, excuse me, he asked another, bouncing against one shoulder/ watch it/ against another/ where do you think you’re going/ until he walked into the embrace of a beautiful woman. Hedayat tried to retrace the steps that nightmare. It’s only the future, Q reassured, embraced tighter, recite. Only the future, Hedayat repeated after her, and when his face refused to abide and his thoughts remained close to the fire in the unnameable country, she tried lightening the moment: So pepper makes the crazy, Q sent up a froth of laughter, and I agreed with her then.
Eventually, the night dragged its feet, as do all great nights, and Q and Hedayat emerged from their pepper rush into the lunar dust and sublunary light of the curving alleyway where I kissed Q, her collarbones, her solar laugh that my mouth dampened. Accelerando: time rushed arteries flowed quick venal wait as seconds dragged loud minutes of silence. What are you doing, she asked when I paused, reached into my shirt’s inner pocket for flight.
Once upon a time, I said as I gave her a bootlace stored in a velveteen pocket, once upon a time a no-good charlatan pretended to be my departed Niramish’s friend’s uncle. He gave me a gift I distrusted until it lifted me out of the darkest place. A bootlace, she looked at me incredulously. A bootlace, I affirmed. How does one, she began, and saw me tie it around my ankle. All right, she gave an impish grin and did as I did. That’s when I took Q by the hand, raced alleyway skittered wall up onto rooftop. We leapt again and again until she whoa/ close to the edge of rooftop and deepest drop.
But we just scaled a building wall fearlessly, I reminded her, as she looked at me daft as if we’d taken the elevator. Come on, I coaxed, plucked the buzzing sky caught her a firefly fluttering noctilucent palm. And these, I pointed to the magic laces at our ankles, and she kissed me instead of speaking her disbelief. Hallowed her lips and tongue, hallowed the water of her mouth. Let
’s live to do it again tomorrow night, she said, as I stepped away from her embrace for one moment to look into the vast abyss before the next building, the between-space where one could see toy cars hundreds of metres below. Okay, I agreed.
Accelerando: time heightened its tempo. Fortissimo: the days became weeks became months so loud so quickly we hardly knew what to make of the changes. To blow a little pepper produced an unprecedented masquerade effect: El Doubly Tea began to overfill with nightly carnivals, which was not the lottery’s prescribed revelry, and it was difficult not to sneeze at, once after entering, for the dark clouds of crushed smoke that hung perpetually in the air, or to pocket one’s ears for all the din. In order to accommodate the overflow, all chairs and wooden tables were replaced with long metal counters, which housed lines of pepper shakers and glasses for the free jugs of sangria. Motley waitresses would pass in between and through the crowd, replacing the contents of each, and the only thing that wasn’t free was the black pepper.
Something curious: the mutagenic effects of black pepper were conscribed to El Doubly Tea. No doubt other establishments tried to replicate such a lucrative venture, which increased the house revenue threefold, but they failed utterly, because it was not the pepper, as owners Hamida and Abdullah would proudly declare, though they never explained what was the key.
Then the Vulgarists arrived. Bete and Arachnae were the first, he with his extensive ball of yarn, which he kept with him at all times, which he would concatenate into knots he said allowed him to record any idea depending on the style of knot, of which he supposedly knew thousands—all thoughts recoverable at a later time by touch—and she with the flattest of faces, which allowed no light to escape, not for its colour but its ceaseless absent expression.
She was a painter of triptychs, only triptychs, she specified once, and offered no other explanations of her craft, though she would wear dresses of coarse lateen painted in broad solid colours, which one presumed were of her own design. As a counterpoint, he wore a goatee chin and mouth, which gave him the appearance of an off-duty sergeant of the armed forces, though his voice was placid and his eyes had the black drinking quickness of a lemur. What he actually did, aside from knotting balls of yarn, no one ever found out, but he belonged to the Vulgarists, and that gave him distinction.
Who were the Vulgarists. And what will they say about the Vulgarists once upon a time. How will posterity frame their projects vast tarpaulin sheets over richest neighbourhoods of Victoria Benediction La Maga with the words CARSANDHOUSES painted CARSANDHOUSES, CARSANDHOUSES repeated on top of actual cars and houses. The Vulgarists screamed when they wrote, painted, sculpted, made collage.
INSPIRED BY THE NAMELESS REBELS, THE VULGARISTS MADE A NAME THIEVING MOVING MIRRORS THROUGH THE WARREN TUNNELS AND USING THEM SMASHED IN ARTISTIC PORTRAYALS OF THIS REGIME’S GROTESQUERY: BILLBOARDS REPLACED WITH SMASHED MIRROR BLOODY TAIN AND BACK AND NEWS OF THE LOTTERY’S RECENT BETS, CHALK ON CAR ON HOUSE ON GRAVEL WITH THE COVERED OBJECTS’ NAMES WRITTEN LAYERS OF PAINT MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER MIRROR: COLLAGE AND KALEIDOSCOPIC REFRACTIONS OF LIFE IN THE UNNAMEABLE COUNTRY. THE OCCUPYING ARMY BEGAN TARGETING AND FOLLOWING THE VULGARISTS. THOSE THAT GOT AWAY BEGAN PROPPING MIRRORS ON WOODEN CONSTRUCTIONS, CRACKED SHATTERED MIRROR-MIRRORS REFLECTING THE MIRROR-WALLS THAT THE MIRROR STARTED BUILDING LONG AGO AND WHICH, OVER THE YEARS, ENTIRELY COVERED THE STATE. THE VULGARISTS BUSTED BLOCKADE MIRRORS TO SHOW MIRRORS PREVENTED EASE OF TRAVEL AND MULTIPLIED NEEDLESS SUFFERING, REDESIGNED, RENAMED, REORDERED HOLLYWOOD SHIT MIRRORS, BUSTED MOVIE MIRRORS TO SHOW HOUSES BONES TEETH AND HAIR AND HOUSES AND A CAR IN EVERY DRIVEWAY, LAUGHED THE VULGARISTS BLACK SPUTUM.
During the day, the Vulgarists lived at El Doubly Tea. It became their home away from the La Maga Academy of the Arts, and Hamida and Abdullah were not only glad to donate the walls floors ceilings falling paint and chalk to their whims, but even to set up hammocks to accommodate their odd sleeping schedules.
Once, while they were spreading manure over a large bust of the Governor, Hedayat asked what they thought of contemporary art, and the room froze for one moment before issuing a sound like a ruptured gasline. Laughter out of little corners until let him, hush, Bete smiled and tried to thread his language through the still-hissing crowd.
In a single word: propaganda, he began. Every little. He stumbled. He smiled. He asked: Do you notice every film, H, or teleflicking advertising firm, and when every schoolboy doodle is the same hatred and identical. Ask this, H: Whence the spontaneity or ownmind ownlife.
Arachnae cleared her throat: Shit of rien de shit the shit to clog, she spat crystalline on the ceiling hung stalactite, and a little light shone from her mouth: to occlude all paths leading to any conclusion but the one: is this not the objective of propaganda.
Which one, Hedayat asked.
Total, the room tsk-tsked.
Surface-level topsoil totalshit, another laughed.
Farms and landfills, someone added.
Deep also, said the brushes and the foam churned inside Hedayat and his feathers rose up.
He shivered. And yet what are you: he pointed to the manure-laden bust: Is this not also propaganda in its own right.
The room laughed; there were hisses.
Bete merely shrugged; we are twenty-five of us Vulgarists on a bright day; twenty-five people cannot make propaganda. By definition, it is everyone eating ownflesh; by definition, it takes an entire perpetual beehive.
Despite his lack of a craft, Hedayat found a vocation at El Doubly Tea when he was not assisting Q at the Hospice, and he would carry paints and the utensils of the day’s exercises and watch as they worked, while Bete knotted his ball of yarn into nodes for future reflection. Here were others in whose company it was possible to understand that the daily world shook deep vibration into bones, and that its smells were poison and that every apple in every marketplace was a lottery ticket to oblivion, systematically itemized, poisoned accordingly.
The margins in the unnameable country had become absolute: either in or out, tarrying to decide or to think had become dangerous, impossible, and contemplation criminal. Here were others who not only understood but who heaped onto the canvas and sculpted into shapes and pointed fingers.
Let it be known Q also preferred the company of the Vulgarists, but not the way Hedayat did. You and I, she would say, and others like those of the Vulgarists, and others like those of the original Eve, she would sniff a little pepper in the nighttime when we would still frequent, but not them, she would conclude: I have never observed a total transformation.
And this was true. It was something odd about the arthouse crowd, as if they understood but could not exactly perform the animal or machine. They coughed and they sneezed and blew an awful lot of pepper, they made motions toward either and yet one always knew these were incomplete trials, as if they were truly too human to change.
Not me, Q would say, I’m a mosquito, and I’ll always be.
I loved her then, and truly it was good then. Between her and the ghosts and the Vulgarists on the other side, I was either with her or with them, my nights and days filled with laughter and contemplation, contented, in a word, until.
One day, while in between either place and shortcutting through the Warren tunnels, I found myself pressed up against a rockface, which gave like an oomph before my feet dangling and mouth cried uncle; but not actual uncle and a return, actually, of those Herculean words: child of clay and of clotted blood, born of woman, do you know me. I did not recognize the voice that was no longer spilling stones, which I had not heard once in the past two or three, during which I could have cared less because I was happy in the world, but he held me above the subterranean soil for so long I finally knew and cried out, mercy, Masoud, I have not forgotten. Then the rockface released me and exhaled. The tunnels’ string of incandescent bulbs gave me his form and I saw it was indeed Masoud Rana, and I was happy because I remembered his illumined speech near the jetty on the morning I thought he was a friend.
Tell me, friend, he jingled his pockets, what are you worth these days. I thought of my once robust savings, which had dribbled through the holes in my pants like so many little pebbles and more of which I had scattered because I was certain there were many more where the ocean met the Gulf of Eden.
Come with me, he dragged me by the scruff of the neck, while dragging behind him our cart of daily wares.
That was how Hedayat returned to the courier’s grind, and he did not like it then. Though slowly it replenished his depleted stock, he had little time for carousing with artists, and when he found himself back at the Hospice, the television gave out its stock colours and sounds, there were too many diaphanous shapes shuffling about like forgotten memories, it was difficult to remember who preferred rose oil with her blood or who liked yogurt and chopped parsley afterward because he didn’t like the taste of blood at all, who were hunger striking and dancing skeletal with death beyond death, would anyone like to play dominoes, and all the tasks toward which he forwarded steps, though Q never asked. Nevertheless, a yellow ribbon of light would trail behind her when she was content, her gratitude and generosity were boundless, and her breath was an effusion that enriched the whole Hospice. For a long while, the mere company of each other was sufficient to mule the burden of work that drew deeply on their resolve and resilience.
Time passed. Since the lease renewal of the American air force base, the splintered religious groups gathered under the umbrella of the Islamic Justice Party, which was the largest political organization of its kind and situated in the Warren. Their divided understandings of the American military presence, exegeses of the lottery economy, the role of women in society, conflicting definitions of nationalism, of Islam, opinions on the Madam’s regime, of The Mirror, whether reason and the soul were the same or separated, whether the ghosts of the mirrors were soulless vaporous images or the continuation of human beings, if there were such a thing as the ummah or the term was misleading, if it was forgivable to exchange the divinely ordained activities of the right and left hands, all seemed less relevant in light of a choking repression like none other in the unnameable country’s history, and nowhere worse than in the Warren.