by Ghalib Islam
For every anisette the hunchback drank, Imran drank four, and by dusk they had lifted out of an ocean of endless time two skeletons of their lives apart. Then they paused at a reef to order more anisettes and gazed at each other with the laughter of the living dead as the little mountain swift chicks continued cheeping and kept wanting to come out of Imran’s sleeves and his pockets. It was a good time for which my father, bereaved of his wife’s goodwill and the company of his best friend, was truly thankful.
Would you like a job, Imran spoke now as Gorbachev, because despite the dipsomania he had managed to keep a clear head.
I need a job.
Then you can have a job, friend.
And that was how my father found employment in the constabulary as a record-keeper of the city’s complex kleptocratic network in an office in downtown La Maga. The job was difficult, despite his experience in the Archives, because the dead kept piling up so high and mixing with the living. At that time, it had become customary for members of gangs in the city to take the names of their dead comrades, so that Hassan Mahmoud would become Hasan Ratrace Elvis Mahmoud, which often meant not only that he had inherited some of the others’ wealth but also, because taking the names of the dead sometimes meant he assumed their characters (often with surprising accuracy), he might even be continuing to live out parts of their lives as well as his own.
Mamun M worked out of the house, which equalled the acquisition of an expansive table and two metal filing cabinets, and these left even less space for others, including the Quintuplets, though, granted they had begun attending school during the days. The presence of so much paper in the home, so much paper floating like cobwebs through the rooms or crabwalking across the floor or slithering like slugs, boiled Shukriah’s blood and increased her fury to heights that frightened even Gita, who recalled her own days of whipping her son with renewed contrition. But the hunchback would not relent, and only pointed to the constant presence of the workmen, whose noise of jackhammers and slathered stink of onions, coffee, and halitosis were ubiquitous, and who were still digging the same mineshaft for the prison, though now they claimed they had attached a wire-system of pulleys crucial to the elevator’s functionality.
Throw them out first, my father would say.
But the workmen came and went, immune to Shukriah’s wrath, while the papers concerning the dead, living, and living-dead kleptocrats mounted everywhere and so high that our home became a sort of archives; one could detect pauses in daylight as it devised courses around all the obstructions in our apartment.
These children poorfive kids, Shukriah complained one day, when Hedayat happened to be present. That was the moment Hedayat burned with oversight, suggested how about I take them for a time.
You, uttered the incredulous voice.
Yes, I, why not after all.
Absolutely not, you would take them through some tunnel place and they would godknowswhat.
No, I said, I know a place, a very good place. Nothing would have occurred had Gita not argued on my behalf. Primary and secondary schools were going to close soon because of nationwide demonstrations organized by the Madam’s regime in support of renewing the twenty-year leasing agreement with the Americans over their hinterland air force base, due to expire at the end of the year.
The ersatz vacation would be perfect, she declared, for Hedayat to introduce them to other spaces in the city than home, neighbours’ homes, swimming club, and school. But just where exactly, she asked.
A good place, I repeated, and imbued in my descriptions of Q and the Hospice an ambiguous dignity, by which I mean I named neither.
After the paper tower of reports she had been leaning on collapsed and nearly crushed Shukriah, she became convinced I was describing a clean edifice free of satanic revelry and assented. The Quintuplets responded to the offer of elsewhere with the stampede of free herd animals, even Nehi.
I had not warned Q; so many characters passed through that house of the damned that to add a few more would not alter the balance too much; I trusted her generous nature and knew she would enjoy the surprise.
It was quiet when the six of us came to the Hospice that day. The television was spewing the silent ashes of an in-between channel. The ghosts were moving pieces on the chessboard from Staunton to various gambits and back again to the start, sipping red from the glass or staring with mouths agape at the silent television. None of them noticed us. I tried to introduce but gained no sympathetic response. I wondered where she was, and then noticed the brewing odour; once detected it replaced all other smells and through curiosity it transformed into a ribbon of light that possessed a colour that could almost be touched.
Let me find her, I told the five, stay.
I followed the light past the empty sleeping chambers of the ghosts, with their square perfect bedsheets without a crinkle or cottonwisp of dust, and it pulled me whispers closer until revealing its soundshapes the truth of the mewling, which was climbing into a howl behind the only closed door in the whole house, and which in no time grew into the first pangs of relentless torment before another and another. The full effect of that cataclysm would not occur immediately; at first it was only a palsy of the hands, which was to last two hours. It was also noticeable that the floorboards of the house had become a turbid swamp, through which any feet, but especially mine, would have found navigation difficult and into which my left and right sank to their fetid bones. Recall, though you cannot know, it was painful to swallow the burning coals in my mouth.
In the kitchen, preparing sandwiches for the Quintuplets took me nearly an hour, though it was a life-affirming task that gave me strength to oversee the fate of the ghosts and whether their fill of blood this late afternoon. When finally she emerged, and he also/ who might these darlings: she was radiant, and a healthy fawn’s glow burned on her cheeks.
The Quintuplets occupied a whole couch, blinking at every item of worn-out furniture and every ghost in sight. They remained silent and blinked at her, as I urged them to speak.
But you never, her lips flashed brightly, he never told me a thing, and, damn, five of you, too. One by one, she quizzed them on all various topics until, by virtue of her ability to understand the inner world of any human being, living or undead, by a manner of interrogative sonar that relied not on the responses of the individual but on the way her voice reverberated inside the other, she clapped hands very good, satisfied with her primary assessment that these were five exquisite specimens of Hedayat’s kin.
There was a man who did not introduce himself, and he stood there, neither introducing himself nor being introduced. We’ve brought hammocks and we’re staying, declared the Yea Quintuplet Hum.
Is that right, Q meditated on logistics for three moments before berating me on my culinary choice. Sandwiches letssee, she peered in between the bread; hardly, Hedayat, come look, she drew me up from the carpet by the hands.
Her mere touch crossed all the wires and I withdrew as she was a naked electrical. She followed me with her eyes to the kitchen, and there her eyes shrank and her lips moved to ask a hidden question, but no sounds emerged.
From that day on, all eight of us camped together in the bedroom adjacent to the lounge, and there was so much spontaneity in those hours, and the Quintuplets eased the tension and incorporated the three of us into their ceaseless merriment so easily that my ears began to forget and my liver detoxified the nightmare of the brewing odour that became a ribbon of light that turned into the mewling and howling that still echoed through the house if you paused to listen.
It was difficult to grow accustomed to Q’s fleeting touches, conciliatory gestures in darkness, an errant hand lingers, or a foot touches foot extended under the other’s blanket, because the perpetual hieroglyphics of my mind rearranged them into shapes that gave rise to another theme of palsy of the hands. For several days after, she rested her chin on my shoulder as I stared into the distant reaches of the lounge wall on which hung a large empty frame for no more than
two minutes, and while speaking, seventeen commonplace words punctuated end stop by her explosive laughter, I was assailed by an abdominal illness that was painful and whose symptom was florid shit: hyacinths floated in the bowl, not unlike the Governor after first gazing upon the ageless beautiful corpse of Caroline Margarita, the digested petals of birds of paradise, which I had never consumed, and a whole lotus flower with its water roots still intact.
What had meant to be an overnight vacation extended into a week, and then three weeks, while outside, the protests against the renewal of the air force base raged, and we could hear the strikers and understood from the television the violence was escalating and the papers had been signed already and the real strikers were outnumbering the Madam’s propagandists four to one, because the American air force base was due to remain in the unnameable country for another fifty-six years, it had been decided.
We stayed at the Ghost Hospice, and my sisters accustomed to Q’s presence better than I did. One day, I was listening to the radio while kneading dough when Q stole up, leaned close, dipped finger into a bowl of batter what’s this/ don’t, I exclaimed, it’s for them, for shit’s sake. I had never shown anger in her presence but at that moment her face arms legs near me were fucking hell. I fled to the interior of the Hospice where a sad thread of smoke lifted from my cigarette. We live in a halfway house, I thought, a place of recovery and the chance for life after death for some and the interval between death and a deeper death for others. I heard Q’s quiet motions mixing measuring fluids, battering flour and blood for the ghosts. How reassuring the sound of her breathing, her presence in the world. I wanted something magnificent with her for one moment, to fulfill with her the dream she had balked at the night we scuttled up walls and leapt on rooftops almost to our deaths. She and I had broken for a time when Masoud Rana convinced me to include black pepper on the side as part of our daily dealings. I was initially against the idea but he cajoled so sweet minimal investment so strongly I found myself moving swift pound bags larger than ever. Our old contacts touched us good for dough and for a bit I felt enlivened walking our old Warren haunts.
Q pretended not to notice or care when I rolled into bed at three in the morning, and absence makes fond reunions, I thought, but one night, I awoke to find sheets pillows blanket made crags and gullies between us. I flattened the impositions with my hand, thinking I’d find her underneath it all, flung them away from me, but only my bed stared back.
It was dark in the room when I thumped onto the floor, and that’s when a thoughtless tack fuck it got right up there. I howled knife wounded as morning wind blew bedroom through window. Foul odour drifted open sewer tributaries. The Hospice’s location in a pissand-orchard La Maga neighbourhood meant we could afford to rent our apartment turned care facility, but also that it came with few light switches. Solid shapes prohibited me abrupt sounds. I stumbled in the dark. Liquid flecks of fallen glass from a table.
I got as far as the joint of our room meets hallway, which featured a standing fan we sometimes hung clothes on, but in the darkness it felt like coarse trunk of tree. Owl-eyed, I looked ahead and beside and finally turned my head around a hundred and eighty to inspect all the shifted bedroom shapes. Frightened, I hurried back into bed, bumping into boughs, trunks, knotted roots, nameless objects along the way, confused about where had she gone, shivering, motherless child, until I felt her body sneak back under the sheet with prodigal caresses, kisses on face shoulder arms, I just went to get a drink of water, she said.
How long it’s been since we’ve spoken intimately, I thought at the end of my cigarette alone in an interior room of the Ghost Hospice while recalling that moment long ago, how long I’ve trespassed on those moving images, regions of our bed together, how long it’s been since Q and I separated. I thought these things as I withdrew bootlaces from my velveteen packet and tied them around my ankles. I thought of how we had fought over my decision to return to black pepper with Masoud to pay bills, thought about how she’d said screw it, we’ll hop from grant to NGO grant, Hedayat, leave that shit, love, I/ I wanted to repair those fissures now with a test flight.
It had been a long time since Masoud Rana and I had leapt deep underground archive of magnetic reels onto a road near my parents’ place, if you’ll recall our banquet with the animals many stages earlier. I hadn’t tested the bootlaces since and the opportunity arose at the sound of Q calling Hedayat through the afternoon sunlight.
At the sound of my name from the kitchen, I flew to her side. How did you, she began couldn’t finish for my lips against her lips as I jumped up while embracing her. Our feet flapped so high we lost our breaths floating above the kitchen cabinet dirty dishes fennel broth chickpea salad and blood pudding for the ghosts.
I stayed because I wanted to be near Q and also because of the good time the Quintuplets were having, especially during their games of checkers with the ghosts, whom they thought of as old talking prunes and ensouled oranges, whose citric fluids required daily replenishment. Nehi had the patience to learn the rudiments of chess, though she insisted on playing with the ghosts only if the pieces moved according to her rules, which they allowed. The Yeas had begun to include her in their games, and she even participated in rounds of Ring Around the Rosie, though not always, and hardly with their volatile ambition to fall down great theatrics, or to repeat the dizzying motions so often that she was left muddy thinking the rest of her day. Then everything changed because the ghosts of the skeletal hunger strikers.
We didn’t know at that time why Masoud Rana’s great frame was wasting away, but it would grow clear in the scene that began when I called after his immense land porpoise’s gait, hard to catch up to those swimming arms that propelled him from one step to step through folds of the cloak of beforedawn. The ocean breezed and the water was talking, but at that moment I felt only the buzz of anguish inside me because I realized Masoud Rana was my friend, because he too had suffered, was suffering. Many years later, when we would become mortal enemies in my mind and play opposites in a great game/ but at that moment he was my friend and I strode across the sands to meet him.
I reached him before the first stone fell from his mouth, when he was just sucking stones. He had them in his hands and he was putting them into his mouth one by one, and I was laughing while he spilled rocks from his mouth for the tears he couldn’t cry, I presumed, for he once told me he had never cried, not even while he was being born; I recall responding I was also born tearless, but that I had cried on occasion.
What now, I asked, when he was stopped for a moment. Who hell, I kidded, but there were still only mouthstones falling and falling. Is it her then, I asked outright because it was better to say it simply. Is it for her and me that you, I repeated; because you needn’t, I said, but his face.
She, his fingers coursed over the word before he broke down totally as everywhere the Law, he cried without warning, and of course pebbles from the mouth. He continued and spoke of many things at once, I felt his thoughts meandering in his mind blinked from one to the next idea passing through fluttering eyelids, and I saw them falling out with the stones. He included in his soliloquy the blood we funnelled into bottles for the ghosts, the blinkers, the hunger strikers, the phosphorescent ghosts, and all the others, the strikers, the strike, the Madam who drove three fire hoses to flush out His shit from the stables that had become the Presidential Palace, but only to roost her own anda of oblivion mutatis mutandis, the American air force base that would stand for a century or part of one century, and then he genuflected to raise the beach sand that was for his forehead, and he poured a handful there, and the rocks, recall, that were falling from his mouth as he wailed. When the beshitting Law that plays all-knowing God/ and they are always doing it, he wailed.
Difficult to distinguish what were stones and what were words, and I was laughing because I didn’t remember him storing so many pebbles in his mouth, yet they continued to fall, one by two or more down the front of his shirt, and we were walk
ing very far from the car then. In the distance, I could see that Q and the Quintuplets had emerged from the vehicle, and they were advancing toward us, though they were still far away. I said tell me, do you drink the blood that is meant for the ghosts, Masoud. And for as long as it took for the darkness to break and for the dawn to reveal that he had been trailing blood in the sand for a hundred metres from a netted cracked glass gash in his right foot, he buzzed between closed lips and would have continued deliberating like a wild honeybee had I not/ will you give me already, Masoud: what of the blood, man, do you drink it or not.
But only the beshitting Law interested him then, and he began to wail anew: Which peels our fruited hide, Hedayat.
So I met him at that plateau, said yes, friend, for the nectar, and then we are husked.
We had discovered the language that mattered and now I listened as he spoke: what would prevaricate and break itself, the Law above the law, again and endlessly in order to prove its bewildering strength. He did not speak of the forced volunteer blood drive that he had. He stopped. The wind had picked up by then, and the rocks were still falling from his mouth, but I no longer noticed how many, or perhaps he was swallowing them too.
I wasn’t with Masoud when he shot Morris the cop, but he said he killed him; that’s what he said in the tsetse fly heat, in the days before Black Organs trailed us cold shadow in every corner and jokes could be passed, I killed a man, he could tell us, and because of his powerful stature, his voice that echoed long after he’d spoken, we believed him murder. But where the body, dead cop, and blood. Masoud Rana would never go to jail, I would, and he would be the source, as I would blame, for four years suffering in prison cell, as I will tell you.