Fire in the Unnameable Country

by Ghalib Islam

  For a long time, the water there had become as saline as the Gulf of Eden; the turbid fluid that emerged from the taps came and went without warning. Darkness declared monopoly and engulfed the residents whenever it pleased as the electricity, gasoline, and natural gas were even more fickle than the water supply. Many people tried to leave, and often they were crushed in the tunnels, like families of rabbits by armoured bulldozers doing their grave work above ground. (Meanwhile, the courier’s life grew riskier.) All the grains of sand seemed also to be trying to flee its cordoned premises, leaving the earth there smooth like a sun-polished whalebone.

  Everywhere there floated the stench of rotted memories, and the future became mixed up with the present; out of nothing there bloomed the story of a little boy who kicked his soccer ball across the mirror-walls and found it several alleyways later, extending from the arms of a man with two weeping glass eyes who claimed to be his grandson. Volunteers from the United Front (as the umbrella organization became known) travelled from home to home carrying siphoned gasoline, firewood, baskets of bread fruits vegetables, schoolbooks and confectioneries for children, freshly built furniture, offers of zero-interest loans, with fingers pressed to tight lips, say nothing, you hear nothing, know nothing until the time.

  When a world of young people from the Warren began trickling into El Doubly Tea, I had the premonition things were about to change in the unnameable country. At that time, the nightly carnivals had grown bolder and the carousing more urgent, as if there was no time to lose because the future could fail to arrive at any moment. The Vulgarists, who had never mastered the art of blowing a little pepper, sought to cover up their failure by accessorizing according to others’ metamorphoses: beaks and canes became fashionable, ostentatious feathered boas and large plastic turtlebacks, even fur, despite the region’s tremendous and perpetual hostile heat, not to mention letting off the scent of carrion: all these were preferable styles.

  We knew the four newcomers were different because they stood out in those peacock proceedings as if covered by a dark lugubrious umbrella; their clothes did not befit an establishment that was becoming increasingly tailored to the likes of the young student crowd; they looked sad, though not pitiable poor, and their eyes were consuming everything, asking questions and acknowledging the responses their minds formulated in the next moment, and they didn’t speak a word. They seemed to know why they had come and took their seats along the third row of the metal tables, where they began pouring onto the crook of their thumbs and forefingers without first having a drink of sangria, which was customary to do.

  I didn’t stop looking at them for an instant and was staring so much that Q took my elbow and quizzed me silently what’s new with you. I couldn’t say until they were well peppered and starting sneezing and blowing like a brass band about to start. Let me remind that among the four there was a tall and thick, a short and mangy, a box man, whose shoulders were wide, and an innocuous older woman, who played the cautious notes and who seemed familiar.

  Who is she, Q floated into my thoughts.

  Then they began: the four newcomers, after having inhaled their first tinctures of black pepper, began—listen to this—hear that blue buzzing from lips as if they are the striking midnight on twelve thousand trumpets: is that not the sound of Gabriel at beginning or unyielding clamour. Then whole bodies shaking and moving to the ground, recall as if you were there, a summit of dancers, limbs and heads piled high and thrown joyously and the idiosyncratic jukebox was going then, but it didn’t matter because all the sound was everybody’s. Every throat in El Doubly Tea was adding a noise, shaking tremulous into that transformation.

  We followed them outside as they continued to blast their mouth instruments, the pied and so many singing rats and dogs behind them, panthers, standoffish prickly hedgehogs, bird-beaked humans wearing canes and with painted faces, spinning computer hardware, floating eyeballs, dragging the lyrical odours of garlic, black pepper, onions, raisins, and freshly baked bread, and recall from the footage the cameras were there, and that The Mirror continued to follow in vans and trucks what was for its crew no doubt a loud and impersonal clamour, and in the midst of that multitude I could hear Q’s mosquito-buzz, because every so often I would press my ear close to her so I could add thirds or fifths to her song.

  They found us, of course. The sirens scattered the crowd and the fear of truncheons, but when we broke apart, Q and I were not so far from the four and away enough from the coppers. We whistled at them and they waved back and smiled.

  Fine performance, Hedayat extended, we don’t ordinarily experience bands at El Doubly Tea.

  We’re not a band, said Tall and Thick.

  But you were an oboe, if I remember, Q said.

  We introduced, met hands, and that was when it became possible to know and not to have to weep with all mybody body later when I realized the truth about the unnameable country; the pieces may have fallen into place much sooner, is what I mean.

  Hedayat, she spoke my name, and I wondered if, but the sound was not exactly right, the face not identical but it had been so long I blamed time for the errors and as I had done in the Warren tunnels when faced with the Herculean truth, I named, for what else.

  Aunt Shadow, I pronounced on the interrogative.

  She smiled and gave a soft hand as if the years had caused other changes, as well, and it was no longer appropriate to embrace.

  Where, I said.

  In the Warren.

  And for how long.

  Since forever or since leaving the hosiery shop.

  And then.

  I have a job.

  Is that so.

  Yes.

  That’s what the music was for, added Short and Mangy, clogging a nasal issue with fist and snort.

  I didn’t understand then, but they said they would be back, and lifted a patch of asphalt, which spread apart to reveal an abyss into which they descended one by one, each with a wave goodbye. Hedayat would not discover they were Black Organs until he would meet them again a long time afterward.

  The buzzing of the brass band lingered for several weeks, peeking out from corners of the air all throughout the unnameable country, and causing strange disturbances in people’s lives. One morning, Osman Yathrib, assistant to the vice president of an advertising and marketing firm invested in precisely locating trash in the streets and in the low atmosphere, as well as mapping corporate spies across the urban landscape for the purposes of hunting germinal desires, for capturing hearts and the hidden sighs of denizens, for seeding rumours and cultivating them into purchasing trends, the same Osman Yathrib who had barely known an ironed shirt out of his BCom, a company unknown until recently drafting a proposal for the novel appearance of holographic advertisements on the streets of La Maga and Benediction as a means of capitalizing on the everywhere mirror-walls, heard a sound like a loud blast on a piccolo trumpet, then twice again.

  Osman Yathrib got up on tiptoes, abandoning the pageant queen with whom he had been temporarily sharing a palatial hotel bed, and saw a large wounded deer struggling on its feet in the vestibule leading to the kitchen.

  He approached cautiously. The animal exhaled its pestilential breaths, and Osman discovered, in fact, it was not so much wounded as rotting away at the legs before his very eyes. Its hide gave off the odour of rotting seaweed. Before he could move or do a thing, however, he felt the knots in his stomach tightening and felt human hands lurching, clasping onto his shoulders while hearing a voice speaking clearly and terrified eyes that cried out please, I need a hairpin and a needle.

  That was when Osman saw the tiger trap clasped around the intruder’s legs. He ran into the bedroom to ask, but the pageant queen was very sleepy and turned to her side for another hour’s rest. When he tried to explain the grave situation, his teeth chattered and got in the way of words.

  He returned before sufficing a reply to her rising concern and try as he might, he couldn’t pry open the trap. Osman Yathrib found hims
elf knocking on every room on his floor, on the floor above and below, on all the rooms of all the floors of every building in the world but they all told him no, go away, it’s Saturday, or they glared at him for interrupting until he was ashamed of what he was unsure. He found himself dialing a dead phone and then dousing the fly-infested wounds with alcohol and binding the stranger’s leg with gauze, asking out of a desire to humanize the nightmare, where do you live.

  In an unnameable country, the stranger answered definitively while shivering cold, oh they got me this time, and Osman noticed his skin had the egg-yolk tinge of a man who had been slowly poisoned.

  He had no heart to ask what the other was doing in his hotel suite, knowing that the reasons he was here lay beyond a man dragging around a tiger trap; as well, he was unconvinced the scene was not a hallucination or a nightmare that would vanish with time. But as the day dragged on, he realized no nightmare he had ever had contained so many well-placed details, such as the diabetic hunger he experienced each morning at eleven o’clock for a slice of pound cake, or the heavy timbre of the front door slamming when the pageant queen departed through it with one scream and half a look at that unholy terror.

  He knew it was not a nightmare when the deer that changed into a man died as a man, because from a few experiences in his own life, he could recall he died exactly the way men die. When Osman Yathrib stood up to wash his hands of caked blood, there was no blood. The hallway was filled with strangers, who tried frenetically to leave the hotel, and Osman Yathrib was looking for someone who would listen to the tragedy, but there was no one, because they were all concerned.

  Did you not hear the great brass, all asked him; the fire alarm and public announcement systems had been disconnected by the culprits, they said, and the smell of black pepper hung in the air.

  The incident sharpened Osman’s intuitive understanding of the unnameable country, and he was unsurprised days later when Conception, Benediction, and La Maga were also hit by several explosions. The United Front took no responsibility and blamed the Madam’s regime for fabricating the attacks in the crucial months before the first national elections in ten years. More explosions found the capital, the financial district was closed down for a week, high-level bankers and businessmen cried foul, hired paramilitaries, bought helicopters to prevent the kidnapping of their daughters and wives for ransom. Others suffered with the confused knowledge that other hidden organs of society

  HUNGRY GHOSTS

  Then the hungriest ghosts found their way to the Ghost Hospice, skeletal thin and herded one grey evening by leaderman speaker predicant himself, Masoud Rana. No more, Q did not say, despite that some of the most diaphanous senile ghosts were so translucent four or five of them could have been superimposed on top of one another. Space was the issue; why, Masoud Rana, a high-ranking peregrine of the concrete jungle, obviously able to thisandthat place whenever at will and pulling in the notsobad bucks these days, would not move to a better than this singleroomflat and why he eventually did will be explained in due time. At the moment the new ghosts demand attention.

  They are the thinnest apparitions, as I said, starving shivering nineteen of the sickliest, and incapable of gripping the teacups of their inaugural meal at the Hospice. Q and I had to assist with their drinking, to pre-chew their food like mother birds. Their ingested mash could be followed straight and winding through their digestive machinery, and when they urinated, what emerged was a stream that made them howl. Their excretions (which they did into bedpans, which we later toileted) were a glassy and quivering colloid.

  Q and I couldn’t understand how these nineteen ghosts differed from the others so greatly until Masoud Rana plainly explained: read it in the newspapers like a schoolboy about the hunger strikers of Conception. Then I recalled I had indeed read it, and Masoud Rana had even predicted they would turn up at our doorsteps soon enough, and no doubt, they did.

  You wouldn’t believe it, Owl, but they all fit south of the Datsun, Masoud explained. I myself, he continued, was shitting firecrackers would the woowoos stop us for harbouring a dozen ex-cons and blow-up artists.

  To clarify: there are a lot of ghosts then to port in the Datsun, self-immolators blackened skin stinking all charcoal or luminescent a thousand pinpoints per square centimetre, peaceniks: die-in sleepers rolled over by business business tanks; and of course the hunger strikers, who had wasted thin away in unnameable jail cells protesting identity cards for all ethnic groups that might be a nuisance or incendiary threat/ for everyone, government officials pointed out/ not for everyone to show upon request to an inquiring police officer, as we all knew. There were the ghosts who wanted to know the date because they had opened their morning curtains to a dimensionless sunlight through which they wandered, alone like all the others, for years in that visionless light through which we were forced navigated by touch, some of them insisted, for a thousand years, they informed, until we found our way to the Ghost Hospice. Some of the ghosts claimed to know Hedayat. One of them mentioned Niramish mentioned Hedayat.

  Some of them were prepared to loosen their hold on life and vanished over time, eventually left the Halfway House to embrace the true nothingness of a death beyond death, while the remainder stayed with us as ghosts. To note: some of these members of the human tribe, such as the Friends of Conception, had forsaken eating in life, but in death, they had found the pleasures of food. Like all ghosts, however, they could not consume anything without a smattering of human blood, and at first we Ghost Hospice workers midwives of death tried to lessen their hissing urine pain among other ailments.

  We’re not doctors of the undead, Masoud Rana said, and can’t treat afterlife’s medical ailments. Leave them be, was the basic message.

  But their screams terrified us, neighbours began door-banging talking pss-psst to themselves, and soon, we knew the popo would come. But the unspoken policy of the Halfway House remained: no ghost would be turned away or set out into the streets after being offered shelter. What to do but contain the problem, muffle the screams with towels. We offered but still the sounds and gaseous urine: an ammonia-rich fog contaminated the whole apartment. This is the way it was then. Room to room, let us. Inspect with a flashlight, shine a light at the translucent shapes lying limb to limb, head to toe, their hearts available for you to see through translucent flesh and to do it if you will. And always growing in number and variety.

  That was around the time we started sucking hospitals of their throwaway blood, stealing bag after bag of the stuff, of jogging through the halls in tief-nurse uniforms and surgical masks: ma’am, ma’am, doctor sir, and we even had replica badges and education stuff made just in case. We used to do these gigs twice a week, a Saturday and Wednesday kind of thing, from one to four in the morning. We would trawl anywhere from twelve to twenty-six litres of blood, though our brightest tally was a whopping thirty-nine litres.

  The blood did strange things to the ghosts, like loosen their tongues about their lives underground as well as above it once upon. As well, it helped with their health and created a great deal of ass effusions: flatulence I mean, and farting also. Q and I were not interested in challenging the Madam’s Black Organs with its hundreds of thousands of civilian volunteers, who played the role of looksees or follow-follows in what was effectively the biggest street gang on the continent, funded and trained by the CIA, some of them without even demanding to be on any payroll, just out of the goodness of their hearts.

  Live Social, declared the ads, Keep Community Alive, said another, when what they really meant: The most effective way to recruit the public, we realized, was to disappear the enemy so he is everywhere, lead-characters every story, so he is nowhere, defeated and always indefeasible. We did not want to be on any terror watch list or to waste the good years of our lovemaking in various nasty. Fuck that, we both conceded, lying with our fingers curled around, naked on the singleframe cot that sat us up or lay us down. We were interested only in feeding the ghosts.

  And we w
orried for Masoud Rana and for the first time, and spoke of the future potential of the Halfway House what when we are notsoyoung, look how you have come already from seventeen to twenty-three, she would point out, when she was a ripe old thirty years of age. Of all the minor treasures of the tale, now is a good time to reveal the small booty I had kept apart from our daily peregrinations. So why not leave it all behind now, Hedayat. Already in my heart I knew it couldn’t get any better, the narrative had achieved its nadir, whoever was penscratching my life had offered me this one passage.

  Q, I called her back from the forest ahead, where I tried to laugh at this strange choice of scenery, why here before what inferno, and why at all. But no sound fled my mouth, while with my hands I harvested only thorns. I found her after all. When I found her mouth with my mouth my whole body issued with love for her. I opened my jaws again, but the spider had weaved a web there in the meantime, and it was all effusing then from my mouth, all the radii and signal threads, and the spider was swinging out of my open mouth and then from inside the funnel of my throat. That was when I wanted to kiss Q, but I couldn’t.

  There were other forms of pain then as an artificial famine struck the drugs-and-guns savanna we traversed, not a mere bust but a suppliers’ strike, by the sounds of it, but there had been rough times before, Q reminded, and we haven’t ever thought of closing down shop; the Halfway House won’t go under for a few short dollars.