by Ghalib Islam
Do you drink the blood, I pleaded his mouthstones anguish in the sand. Maybe Masoud believes he’s like a ghost, I thought when he didn’t reply, neither living, neither dead. Maybe, I thought, he drinks blood to understand the burden of a cannibal life known to the residents of the Hospice.
Masoud the Generous, Masoud the Wise. And yet I would blame him one day for killing me. Years later, Masoud Rana would claim he had nothing to do with my prison stint a spill blood and cell deep underground. Organs, he would shake his head, Black Organs, brother; today, they’re rounding us up on sidewalks in sidewalk cafés, late night busting doors, haven’t you heard. Masoud the Great, friend and enemy, teller of tales once upon a time, street storyteller of the Palisades until he settled down and became a Hospice worker forever. Why did he black vomit. Did he drink blood meant for the ghosts, maybe as a vampiric act of empathy for the dead.
Then it happened, for the first time, and another of my transformative firsts, because there was a pause in our conversation and I was thinking where is Q: Hedayat turned his head backward all the way around like an owl, and his eyes covered more than metres of beach sand, saw beyond the present dimensions of space. All at once there arose many images of the past: the first was of Q and the Quintuplets advancing across the sands that ended at the Gulf of Eden never ended, which was already memory, already in the past, and which belonged to all the weeks, years earlier, each day clear and simultaneous. He was gouging with talons again and this time he was dancing as well, and he felt the heaviness of another emotion, rarefied and black mirthless, which began on the ship of infections and cattlewhips, cast-iron leggings, of slaves with their game of limbo and that demented trip to a secret Caribbean slave harbour in the early twentieth century. Hedayat gambolled across all the years of the unnameable country with his body facing forward and his head turned backward like an owl until he could feel the century vibrating in every hidden organ of his body.
Raskolnikov’s terror and his earthly weight were there then, but the other voices were very different and forgave him seething cold, writhing, insisting it was good to do what you did, Hedayat, to have sunk your talons so deeply. I heard them say these things in waves of heated indignation, as together they completed the melody and dance that was the mournful ballad and the waltz.
Was Hedayat’s wounded waltz partner the Law. And if so, who was Hamza Alif, clockmaker of La Maga, trampled by a treaded great machine. Or Yahyah Samater, once employed as an Archives clerk, disappeared the same day, vaporized, funtoosh, into invisible air. Who will give the Law unto them. Eventually, there was pitter-patter in the sand as Q and the Quintuplets after all; the girls bounded the final steps with a good clamour that belied their exhaustion. By that time, Masoud Rana’s maddened speech was gone and there were no more stones to hatch from between his lips.
But your foot, Q bent to examine.
A scratch, he gave her a laugh.
Nevertheless, she bent closer, she winced, and took into her the pain of that starburst smeared with dried blood and sand.
The Yeas seized upon the moment as soon as the medical assessment was complete, a remaining shard of glass removed, a game, they cried, and would not relent. Their voices bore the collective cry of a far larger crowd.
He can’t play, said one and pointed at Masoud Rana.
He has to play, said another.
Of course, added a third before the final fourth voice affirmed with a knowing hum.
Masoud Rana played lame, Q reasoned let us at least wash his feet in the ocean, Nehi sucked her thumb, and I too tried my best to yield to their demand let’s play, but it was impossible. Come-all-you, they grabbed our hands and formed an unbreakable circle, and then we were spinning round and round.
HOSANNA
Today I saw a man murdered in the street. How did they kill the man. This is how they killed the man. A bullet kicked up his hair and he bit the grey asphalt as if it was his bread. Hosanna, as they say, and as she was.
Though I didn’t know him, I wept for something for the nameless man murdered in our unnameable country. At a man’s death they take everything; at a man’s death they take nothing, for he finds the singularity of origin and eternal rest. I dug into a nearby bus shelter into the sky and wondered if the bullet had been an Organ’s. You didn’t hear so much about the Organs these days except that they were everywhere. Closed-circuit television is the most watched station in the country, and some people laugh that we watch ourselves better than they watch us. Tell us, if you can, what we are in that case.
Things changed in four years and I no longer grieve for the past, not for Q or for anyone. I grieved for everyone in that boxhole apportioned space because it was given to me to do. After four prison years, centuries, I watched a man bite the grey asphalt as if it was his bread.
Things happened while I was away. My mother awoke one day to find the guards in our home muttering to one another about schedules and dates and conferring together in the kitchen. It wasn’t unusual to find them fraternizing; she had got up earlier than usual and though she wasn’t in the habit of speaking to them, their quizzical expressions demanded explanation. We’re leaving, they said simply, and by noon, they had packed up all their belongings into trunks large enough to house even the insect-legged chairs on which they had guarded the rooms of our home for so many years Shukriah couldn’t remember what it was like before they arrived. She looked at her house without glass partitions, without metal detectors between washroom and kitchen; no more internal security checks, she thought, mystified by the new freedom.
Later that day, my father exited the Ministry of Records and Sources stinking magnetic shit. After so many years of thoughtreels, he thought, I pore it from my balls. He always felt an agoraphobic pang when leaving the barbed wire compound and emerging outdoors after the world got huge in the nine-to-five interregnum, miles of sidewalks such lively children their hopscotch games and companion animals, all the vendors hawking eats sweets and colourful acrobatic toys on the sidewalk. In between indoor and free street feelings, a man emerged from a tinted-window coupe, gripped pistol to my father’s right temple and inside the car, please, Mr. Ben Jaloun.
My mother’s repeated unanswered requests to the government for an explanation prompted her to join a widows’ group, and on weekends, she circumambulated the Presidential Palace with them, beat ladles against pots with them demanding whereabouts and lives returned unharmed. Had her husband not suffered a lifetime already answering to guards in his home who demanded identification to travel between rooms; and what of our suffering, she thought in rage about her bereaved children and her mother. What is a thoughtreel; she too had listened to Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s mind. When would she disappear. Who would beat ladle against pot for her, she wondered.
When my aunt Reshma heard the news, she immediately invited my mother and grandmother to Berlin with the promise she would pay the ticket money. My grandmother, who had never taken a plane, agreed as much for the thrill of flight as for the need to be in a world where her daughter wasn’t digging eyes out with fists all her waking hours. You go, Amma, Shukriah wiped boogers tears with tissue, I’ll manage the hosiery shop while you’re gone. Are you sure, Gita asked, and when my mother returned to weeping streams, my grandmother started packing her bags.
Recall that many years earlier, Gita worked in a government department where they peered into people’s thoughts with shortwave radios, and more than once in her years she had wondered whether the experience of serving innocents up to butchers’ knives desensitized her to the sanctity of human life; she wept with rage, thinking about putting on a fresh dress dark orange pair of sunglasses after her late husband’s death, and starting her life again the very day he arrived at her doorstep heavy as a boulder, coffined. Hell, she gnashed teeth at her tote bag’s busted zipper, and yelled for my mother.
My father never came home after my grandmother left, and Shukriah searched for him in every calling bell call and on the face of each customer t
hat walked into her hosiery shop every day of the rest of her life.
At that time, the Quintuplets were sprouting quick adolescence without a father and sought shelter in Samir and Chaya’s record shop. Under Aunt Shadow’s gothful gaze they began touching black makeup to eyes lips, dangling metal piercings from creative incisions, and they began building pop music collections; Nehi gathered noise albums she blasted into headphones while her sisters went to the lottery. When Hum came home one day with a centimetre patch over a fleck of her nose removed as dictated by her ticket, Nehi buried herself in news broadcasts of the most recent spontaneous fire in a spidersilk refining plant, which had been accused of refining spidersilk for antiballistic army wear.
Four years changed me too.
It happened without warning. I left Masoud at the Halfway House one evening and went to cigarette shop for a soft drink. I was dazed, had been feeling utterly bereaved since a recent trip to the airport whose events I couldn’t recall but which left my stomach and chest full of shards of broken glass. It hurt to breathe, I wore a bandage around my midsection to curb the profuse bleeding, eating was an impossible task, I was constipated shat goat pellets diarrhea rush, fled from room to room of the Hospice and sought comfort among ghosts resigned to a deeper death, and it was Masoud who said to me go, bhai, get yourself some fresh air and a Fanta, and get me one too. A shadow fell across Masoud Rana’s face when he spoke these words, and he shivered in the balmy equatorial June weather. What’s up. Nothing, he said, and get me some rock candy, he added, as I shrugged off his strange demeanour before travelling streets and alleys, crossed quite a few intersections to reach Xasan Sierra’s cigarette shop because I wanted to clear my head, needed the walk, and because I wanted to visit with his daughter Vera, to sit and have a Fanta at her store, see how she was getting along since the army shot up the street and killed her father among hundreds of others when the people protested fifty-six more years of American occupation.
I recognized the landmarks fall friendly shadows late afternoon, and knew the cigarette shop was near. That’s when shimmer and heat peeled my eyes, lifted my skin cooked shrimp in a place where tapering streets required travellers to pass through them sideways, where the walls bled into one another, and that’s where I felt the flutter of a bird insect or bat moving around my body, and when I slapped the sound I brought blood to my right palm and crouched in pain as a car careened into view. A man opened the door held unrecognizable instrument to my skull before shouting loud words into my ears. The universe was shaking when they bundled me into the back seat muffled scream.
Hedayat awoke on a cold concrete floor in a room where walls pressed against his body from all sides. In dim light, he saw that his hands and feet were shackled. He rejoiced when all five walls began gliding soundlessly apart into invisible horizons, when the ceiling continued climbing, when the room’s grey light let him plumb the increasing depths of its length width height, but when he tried to get up he realized either he had grown very large or they had really fucked up his brain with the fuzz pedal to his head, because he remained in place. If it was dusk when they brought him here, the artificial light, which seemed to emerge from the walls, which were opaque if you looked close, turned night black. Crawl centipedes flight of birds/ blade sounds of a string orchestra sustained one million rubble cries/ the breathing of a stranger whose breathing paused when his did, who didn’t answer when he asked who are you. Time passed and to care for himself, Hedayat began once upon a time and halt, cried a voice. Hello, Hedayat tried to address the interruption, but met only silence. Once upon a time, he tried again/ at the bottom of a deep well, he continued despite the interruption, yet halt the voice cried halt in his grave. Again and again he tried to think of his present state of affairs halt and to thread past present future halt but halt was always the forceful response. Glossolalia, Hedayat cried, you have always been with me. Mutter and reason, I’ve trusted in you to part all the shadows, clear a path through the worst times. Was it there when you were with the underground animals, asked a big voice vibrated my skull, or when bigshot Hedayat announced the black economy also has its slavers and supplicants, the voice chided piquant, nasal, unsettled the boundary between outside skull and in my head. Where and who, I looked at the tight walls. Fear, a glacial breath rose up from the soles of my feet how did he know these things about me. What amazes me, said the voice, is that you know we know and that we have always known. Hedayat said nothing. When his thoughts resumed, he remembered his sleight of tongue, that he knew the stories of others who knew. He had thought about them, mumbled their stories to himself of his grandparents knob-twiddling, listening headphones in Department 6119/ there’s a movie about that, the walls shook as they said it. But Hedayat held his ground: my story, my owl’s eyes on my head turned hundred and eighty/ loud laughter scraping glass: the film features a man with two tongues. Hedayat said nothing. Your grandfather, I presume. Fuck you. The voice subsided and for a moment, I felt victorious. I slept in patches of fake nightfall, peculiar daylight, pissed and shat in my pants. I tried to count the days with the revolutions of light and dark but I was convinced they were extending the intervals of each. Day and night occurred for increasingly longer periods, for so long I lost sense of dimension or direction, and the hot box they had put me in started expanding walls again. It continued growing until suddenly, I was sitting on its floor became a plane of sand, seemed suddenly like John Quincy’s enormous room governed by an incandescent sun. How surprised I was when I could get up and stretch finally, when the walls expanded miraculously and the cage became a desert chamber. I heard nothing, didn’t know why, what had happened to the voice or why the walls were running, and I ran at first to get as far away from the big voice as possible, and later, exhausted, I walked in the insufferable heat in the room’s fetid breath electric sunlight, in the damn heat, for miles of dry throat. I finally stopped, removed and wrung my shirt under the high azure ceiling for a drink. Walking the thirsty sands gave me camel dreams. Caravans carrying sheikhs or sultans walked ant lines along the horizon under Oriental skies. I found no shelter except in hot rocks’ shade. I walked for so long in such hot weather that the very name Hedayat became a scattered remnant, grain of sand without memory or longing. Somewhere in the distance, I, if the term is correct, saw a grey rock in the sky and dust. I walked towards the colour and its shape broadened into a brick wall marked veins to mean years of weatherbeating, in front of which stood a lone faucet, metal vegetation rising out of the ground. Like a thief, I searched quickly in all directions, and finding no one, drank greedily from an unknown source. The pressure of the tap suddenly increased violently as I drank, gurgling, bubbling water in my mouth and down my throat, choking me, and when I tried to jerk my head away, I was held in place by the stream. Huge hands adjusted the nozzle while another, gloved pair of hands stretched my eyelids and directed instrumental light into my eyes. The oasis image of wall and faucet disappeared, the sky vanished, while the earth under me waited a second until my body realized it was horizontal, not vertical. Machine squeal a barren room slightly larger than the box I was interned in appeared in its place. I could feel a hard plastic rigour level with my spine, forcefeeding tubes in my mouth, as well as wires, instruments in the room beeping, detecting my vitals. I heard the voice that had hitherto emerged from the walls of my box cell say it’s been a long time, son, it’ll be over soon. He’s going to a dual cell, confirmed the second voice. My last thought was of my mother’s cheek on my cheek while she comforted me during the tsetse fly plague after I told her about the fever dream animals, when she said, your father calls it glossolalia but I think it’s just kid’s stuff, and you’ll get over it as you grow older.
Time passed. When they brought me to the second room, I had been reduced to an item of description, mere diagram, stick figure on a stretcher that for weeks couldn’t move without an intravenous. Slowly, I regained the ability to turn my neck to sound and light, changes in temperature, movement, to the thin sa
nd streaming conical pile on the floor, and to identify the possibility of other human life in the vicinity. I was probably introduced formally to Habib in the months I relearned how to walk and to remember, but I don’t recall the exact occasion anymore. What I do remember about the cell an hourglass is how the sand fell soft through a precise bullet-hole in the ceiling. Every day, the sand would stream through the hole. The conical pile was always already chest high at its centre and spreading, growing higher. From where I sat, I could see that prepared for the inevitable, my fellow prisoner was standing in a corner, smoking, watching the soft drizzle, desert precipitation in the cell, which belonged to a cell block of the prison consigned to silence.
Since I would reside with him in the same room for four years, allow me to introduce Habib, whose three characteristics of note include his quietude, his tobacco addiction, and his curious dice game, which he played constantly, rolling it in his hand in response to the slightest sound in our cell block, closing his eyes, and muttering to himself and smoking as sand rose in our room.
I’ve never seen anyone smoke as much as Habib. He had formed trade relations with the guards, and bartered keenly for slather-grey tobacco and foolscap for rolling paper. He smoked in a corner of the cell, farthest distance from the sands, and buzzed smoke and melody through lips while standing stiff upright with arms folded as guards moved past us, as delirious men were forced to enter adjacent holding rooms, as every day the sands piled higher.
He taught me to sleep standing up like barnyard animals as slaughter prisoners shouted abattoir sounds around us despite the tight laws in this section of the prison against noise, as their minds testified against them from thoughtreels. The agoraphobic claustrophobic horrors of the first room gave way to other sufferings in the second, though interrogations continued. They would haul me out of my cell by the scruff of my jumpsuit collar each day, several times a day when their reasons demanded, and, blindfolded, lead me down dark hallways in soft velvet shoes, as silent years passed by on either side of me, this one five, another one eight, ten years of imprisonment without trial or habeas corpus in one case. Four years for me. Four years of enter vast room shackled while loud disembodied voice demands answers to questions about times lives memories all suddenly suspects in fires in the unnameable country. The same brawny same bawdy interrogator appeared with his scalene pointy face, his humour of drink this, brother, thought I heard you wandered a desert in a coffin cell. This time, he came prepared with questions of whether I had participated in any meetings of the Islamic Justice Party, of what training Niramish had given me in the way of electronics, whether I had funnelled my drug money to any of a list of terror groups more populous than words in a dictionary, as well as with the constant query when had I last seen the Banquet Animals. Do you recognize these, he held up Niramish’s uncle’s bootlaces, the magic that had flown my friend and I out of an underground cavern. No, I lied. So be it, he said, and took out a lighter. Don’t. Why ever not, he teased with a twinkle in his eye. Just don’t. For a pair of laces, he taunted.