by Ghalib Islam
What kept me owl-eyed, focused on understanding our country’s unnameable past, was Q, who told me once upon a time before she left we have never been a nation, Hedayat, we have never been ourselves. I don’t understand. We are the world, she said. What do you mean. Sometimes I forget our name, she shrugged.
For her sake, though she had never spoken of children of her own, because I had never seen her happier, I was glad when there emerged a living child among the ghosts, one with a shell in his hand. He walked right up to Q as if he knew her, the child with coal-bright eyes who never releases his grip on his backward shell.
THE BOY WITH THE BACKWARD CONCH
When the boy with the backward conch came to the Hospice, everything changed because the damp ash smoke of a hundred apparitions trailed behind him. We couldn’t figure out why until Masoud told us he had read in newspapers that spontaneous fires fall on spiderfields, on village residents. It’s as if an asteroid fucked the hinterland, Masoud said about pictures of a moonscape. Where did it happen. Benediction, he showed me the page. Shit, I looked at the photo. Q, who subscribed to a magazine called Unnameable Earth, relayed that it was the largest spontaneous fire recorded in years, and showed us another shot of the region high above the city’s corolla tossing petals three-sixty, all plant animal machine become one flower. The number of reported dead increased daily after that while thousands of ghosts wandered bloodhungry, wailed Re-Employment Office corridors seeking recognition rebirth remuneration for their losses.
That a hundred of them eventually made it to the Hospice surprised us, we expected more, would have welcomed all of them, obviously, but with apprehensions about enough blood. Something was happening: our facility, which had originally been constructed to care for the dying dead before they disappeared from even a faded existence, was becoming a treatment centre for ghosts that wanted to rejoin the world of the living. Benediction’s spontaneous massacre was proving to Q that we were like a United Nations workspace, understaffed, underfunded. As with the multiplying walls and ceiling for sky that now characterized our ensconced unnameable country, she began to become agitated, frustrated. I will stay here and build it nevertheless, I said of the Hospice, because it was respite for me, outside all the shit in my mind. Q didn’t reply.
Fire. We know you. Ever since I can remember, since an ill-gotten, forgotten time long before my birth, fire has been the motif of the unnameable country, exploding hospitals to hell, schools, buildings, machines building machines all collapse and catafalque, gravebound spontaneously without warning.
We had never had to deal with such a large party of undead. They were so translucent we could direct all of them to a single room where their mouths moved soundless, and their faces emerged chest legs torso for mere moments one hundred pale screams. These were ghosts that huddled together, a hundred of them, according to newspaper numbers, in a room, stunned. Like the boy, they didn’t speak.
Like them, he blinked his answers to our questions. We had encountered such spectral tap tap shit, such dit-dahed rise from grave into world another visit, but they had belonged to Chance Game victims who once upon a time had bet more than gallbladders, appendixes, liver sections, or single-centimetre patches of skin removed. We had watched how with their eyes the lottery ghosts reiterated the alphanumeric combinations of tickets they had received accidentally, bought and wagered, had traded for, the pathways from lottery bet to acquired housing debt to lottery-directed removed organs from those whose homes had been destroyed by spontaneous fires, as Hedayat learned from a ghost who in his life had bled to death during a requisite midsection operation and awakened Re-Alphabet in the morgue, speaking the language of his lottery demise ticket number by ticket bloody number, blinking Re-Alphabet for all time thereafter. But the boy and his ghosts were subjects of spontaneous fires, reports of which made peripheral mention on occasion of the hornet hum and unidentifiable aerial motion over a spidersilk region before a blanket of fire but never the direct causes of sound and heat and light.
Suddenly, we had to take care of one hundred more ghosts and the boy. We didn’t know what to do with them at first, but as for the boy, a glow came over Q as soon as she saw him, all love as she was, and he immediately nestled in her crook, hardly whimpering, never for a moment relinquishing the backward shell he held close like a disembodied organ, which he would place at his ear, pause, before turning around to exchange rapid blinks with the ghosts that followed him constantly. Who was the boy with the backward conch and what do they say of the boy.
Recall, if you can, the time of street water that followed, which was a new thing, a Director’s choice, a thing belonging to an imbroglio whose image we had no idea of, so mysterious was he, and who had a handle on all four elements of the periodic table. While we worked, Masoud would tune a transistor radio high volume to an international news station that described how the Director had recently placed enormous heating rods in the Gulf of Eden to create dense humid updraughts for a storm scene of The Mirror; brine collected into cumulus clouds rich with sea fauna. It rained crustaceans in La Maga; schools of albula and barracuda fell from the sky as did pipefish with red posterior lateral lines, which splashed in neighbourhood waters alongside shrimp, crayfish, mussels, lockets belonging to maidens prior to their mermaid transformations, which they had taken with them into deep waters. The wheels and gears of heavy industrial machinery splash-landed. Household and industrial waste seeped into new swimming areas, while hammerhead sharks swam outside our doors with eels that opened demonic mouths containing more incisors than one hundred healthy full-grown men. As the rains grew heavier, trucks got stuck and had to climb out of the mud on long flat rectangles of wood placed before their wheels. The streets flooded up to ankles to knees to thighs in some neighbourhoods, and children waded in between cars, netting, spearing, basketing enough live seafood for weeks of roasted fried boiled marine meals served with rice with lentils with couscous and vegetables.
On Monday, Hedayat waded in the streets and speared minnow with the boy, who carried his conch with him, of course, for the expedition. Tuesday Wednesday featured sardines, and on Thursday they were eating manta meat that Q grilled butane gas cookery, simmered to juice every bite. I gambolled word to word to evoke him speak but my glossolalia yielded no response. Meanwhile, the other room blinked a sea of switches, hundreds of eyes frozen masks moving eyes.
There were human mouths and ghost mouths to feed. Hedayat speared cuttlefish and koi in the streetwater and tried to include the kid in these activities but he wouldn’t leave Q’s nest, her crook of arm, her lap.
Does he speak to you, I asked her.
No.
Does he laugh.
He howls.
Who was the boy with the backward conch, and what do they say of the boy.
Why did the ghosts follow him here, I wondered aloud. How the hell do we feed them, I asked her look, pointed at them flickering lightnightflash, starving. Food, I paced the Hospice, right index at chin, but these were such unordinary apparitions; our ghost encounters were usually with flesh and bloodless types, the dead but still visible, and these creatures couldn’t handle intravenous or eats, so far as we could tell. It was Q who figured it first, let’s try, she said when I asked her bustling room to room what are you doing. Sublimation, she replied finally, and handed Masoud, the boy, and me surgical masks and goggles from the equipment room before melting a solid ice blood pack from the fridge with steam machine, vaporizing red gas. A purr and rumble through the Hospice when the ghosts breathed their fill.
Among the hundred ghosts grew clearer outlines after ingesting blood, I recognized the face of a man anxious fidget for a nic-fix, a face like mine but weathered older from life in the grave, who demanded onions, said he missed eating onions most in the grave, so we got him a bag and he chomped them like apples, streaming tears down his face, this Zachariah Ben Jaloun, my paternal grandfather, who had already been dead boulder in a coffin by the time I was born. I recognized him from my
grandmother’s pictures as the man who undressed minds with her in Department 6119 before they were wrenched apart by Black Organs. He motioned for a light and I passed him my butane flame. He peeled an onion, blinked words with his eyes, but I couldn’t hear. How frustrating, I thought, to meet a ghost with a once upon a time that truly interested me/ what was the stone carapace that your dead body became, Dada, I wanted to ask/ but who I couldn’t understand. I tried some rudimentary blinks whose meaning Masoud and I debated, asked him to tell us how he got here, but my grandfather spoke too quick and difficult with his eyes.
That’s when I felt a tug on my shirt and the boy’s gesture extending, offering me the conch with backward grooves whose regional meaning, according to Q who knew and loved the ocean, brought fortune to its beholder. I couldn’t understand what he wanted until he put it up to his ear, absorbed by sounds I couldn’t detect. I took it from him and heard Zachariah Ben Jaloun say the universe was shaking when the bullet entered my skull through the roof of my mouth, as I caught my grandfather describing his death.
So that’s the meaning of the conch, I said aloud, as I listened with it pressed against my ear; how in that moonscape did the boy find such a thing. Zachariah Ben Jaloun smoked his cigarette. Why did you follow the boy, I asked. My grandfather ignored my question and instead blinked dust, lunar landscape after fire burned silk fields, after a blaze in village acres first covered with thick clotted spiderclouds. The living and most materially composed living dead sifted rubble for hours of rescue, he said, until even wispy ghosts barely bodies began rising dust to live another day, but they still didn’t find the boy buried in the muck and fire.
Rather, Zachariah smoked as he said it, the kid found himself trapped in between fallen walls in open window room of his family home, where he was learning character plus character make a word. When walls fell flaming around him, neighbours rushed buckets of water, and after the blaze retreated showed its rubble, they could find no trace of the kid because in a moment of luck and wisdom, he had managed to find the cellar hatch. Hedayat bummed a cigarette as his grandfather continued.
The boy travelled hours through spidersilk stores and pantry chambers in the rabbit warrens that connected all the houses of his village, lost, but calm walk one hand in found jam jar and the other with conch at his ear. So he already had it with him. It was on his desk; it’s how he heard us wispy ghost types standing in an underground potato storage room, rejoicing lamenting after blast after blast above ground, blinking furious can you believe we’re alive after death. How does it work, I removed the shell from my ear and looked at it mollusc and groove, how do I hear your voice clear in my head while you blink.
Zachariah Ben Jaloun drew a deep breath of foul smoke and said it’s a simple magic, really, found in uncommon shells in beaches of our region. Farmers usually find them in the same environment as minnow lizards that warn of spontaneous fires and keep them as household showpieces. Mind you, backward shells are rare, Zachariah’s ghost informed between bites as the air of the Hospice became sad from onion fumes, and children have always noted something unordinary about such conches, he continued; they use them in echo games because they say backward shells can amplify distant sounds. We think the boy used the conch in the past as a means of hearing a spider farmer acres away named Amir gunned down by paramilitaries belonging to the largest spidersilk retailer, that he used to listen to the old man wandering seized spiderfield heavy flat feet low moaning in graveyard and blinking thoughts of life after death, Zachariah peeled an onion. That’s why the boy was able to recognize our blinking many rooms away underground as whispers, he concluded.
Who was the boy with the backward conch and what do they say of the boy. His region had been recent explosion and gravemounds, so we contacted an adoption agency through which Q filed to continue keeping custody and to induce the organization to try and find his living relatives. He stayed with us in the Halfway House after that. Cot or hammock, I offered; he chose both, hammock for the fly-swatting daytime and cot for night rest. Masoud and I tried to determine requisite meal amounts of blood for the ghosts while Q grew closer to the boy. What will you call him, I asked, and she said she would know when the authorities informed her, but time passed, the agency could find no record of such an individual, and reported it would continue searching for anyone who did. Q said she would invent his name when it came to her; for the moment, he would be her Boy.
That night, the three of us sat in the kitchen ate seasoned tuna can entrees with pita bread. We needed to write entries in our files and report to government agencies the nature of our most recent arrivals, but if the boy couldn’t speak and the ghosts merely blinked. Masoud’s transistor radio told us the Director’s recent storm experiments had been aided by a gust of westerly winds and the movie’s design engineers’ recommendation that the settings of the underwater rods near the coast of the Gulf of Eden be changed for the occasion. The intended result was fog, mist blown into La Maga everyone walk sheets of stratus. By the following afternoon, residents of the city made it home through stumble streets still knee high water and swimming marine life. They found day-old food items in full health of just prepared, fruit pits restored to flesh in their kitchens, calendars marked dates earlier than conflicts with friends, co-workers, colleagues. Time was moving toward greater disorder no longer, it seemed, because of the mist. Though the temporal effects of the fog were initially positive, and though it hadn’t reached the Hospice, the transistor radio recommended higher ground to La Maga residents because of its uncertain nature. We heard voices in the streets grow louder. Let’s go, Q prompted us when the boy began tugging at her sleeve, his conch held up to his right ear. We decided to leave the vaporizer breathing blood for the ghosts to continue eating in our absence, but they wanted to go with us, they followed.
Where, I asked Q. Maroon Peak, she announced, highest point in the city, she said, as we walked Hospice to alleyways, wended shortest route until reaching high mountain trail where the trees cast light shadows above the Director’s fogscape, where you could see all of La Maga and beyond. Fog rose up on the road ahead of us, and I felt cold light move through my body take shape ahead with the others as the ghosts walked through us around us toward that ether. One of them paused near Q, knelt beside the boy. I saw Zachariah’s ghost blinking talking to the boy backward conch up to ear. I saw him hand the kid an onion as a parting gift after hearing words. Then he walked into the mist with the other ghosts. After Q and the boy finished exchanging furious whispers, I asked her, what does he say. He wants to eat an onion like an apple, Q laughed.
RING AROUND THE ROSIE
Ring Around the Rosie: why mention that Abol Tabol macabre rhyme behind whose trochaic sweet-step hides death and the plague. Why drag Albion Britannia, cobbled streets, and the fourteenth century to an epoch of the unnameable country’s history marred by its own mass pathologies and black deaths. Handkerchiefs and crushed flowers. Hasha hasha. We all fall down. No: the rhyme is important, most of all because the Yea and Nay Quintuplets loved it so much. Portentous children with inclusion-exclusion principles as groove-worn as grown-up society; thumb-sucking children who cast faraway stares into the future or engage in blinking telegraphic communication with ghosts. Even such unusual children need to play.
Recall, as if you were there, soon after the arrival of the Boy with the Backward Conch, Q’s breaths fell shorter when I held her, pensively, anxiously, as if she foresaw. I knew she was applying for jobs with Oxfam, Amnesty International, and the United Nations, and she asked me would I like to do the same. Wait, I told her, let me think, I said, and I thought, I considered every moment of the past my owl eyes could see, from John Quincy’s black sputum ship of infections and cattlewhips that was the actual story of the journey from the unnameable country, of its travels to the Caribbean port that secretly still admitted African slaves in the early twentieth century, to Quincy’s discovery of the ability of shortwave radios to hear the human mind, his institution and deve
lopment of Department 6119 its rows upon rows of thoughtspies that greatly contributed to the hundred-year transformation of our country into corridors and hallways.
Wait, I told her, let me think. I thought about Masoud Rana and how he was still drug dealing, about my owl’s suspicions of Black Organs rounding every street corner behind me making every shadow in every alleyway, of being arrested. Does he need to keep doing this, I lamented to her. Does he need to come home night after night a sick and booger-dripping fee fi giant eat all our provisions, I thought, hungry after his desert drug dealing, about which we never ask but which makes a purse sound night after night spill coins onto kitchen table, I paced, gnashing teeth, and after which he falls into a sternutatory nap of sneeze afternoon to sneezing evening unto nighttime, sneezing and coughing and sleeping and sneezing that disturbed the Hospice’s bubbling atmosphere of love so much I couldn’t stand Masoud Rana’s congested thoughtlessness that left Q and me to tackle all the everyday tasks of running the place, and I got up one morning to go to my parents’ home for a few days for a break, and without even a goodbye to Q, tiptoed into the mirror streets, stepped into a strange house for shortcut purposes, and crossed two rooms with high wooden ceilings. The first contained a boy labouring to teach an older man to read, the man who was cringing and pulling out hair.
Stop, it’s impossible; these are not the sesame words.
The second contained a porcelain tub in the middle, and a woman drenched in suds from top to toe, reaching up into the high notes of her bathing song.
Oh will you, she sang.