Osama

by Lavie Tidhar

  Osamaverse

  ——

  Joe didn’t know what would be helpful or not. There were other people in the hotel dining room and most of them also had Osama Bin Laden paperbacks next to them, and many of them seemed to know each other and were talking, like friends who haven’t seen each other in a while and were busy resuming an interrupted conversation. Joe sipped at his coffee, lit a cigarette, people-watched. The room felt more crowded than it was. He tried to ignore that, tried to ignore the suddenly stifling air, the pressure in his chest that made it difficult to breathe. Voices came at him as if through water:

  ‘…represents the renewing vitality of the barbarian horde as it storms the walls of Rome—’

  ‘Sure, it’s the reinvigoration of society — destruction before rebirth—’

  ‘A reaction to Anglo-Saxon dominant philosophy — the failure of neo-imperialism—’

  ‘…but is it crime or an act of war?’

  ‘Depends on who’s telling the story—’ laughter, a waitress carrying glasses of beer to a table, name tag different to the conventioneers, Hi, I’m June.

  ‘Thank you, um, June,’ two men with beards and hunting vests, clinking glasses — the waitress shrugged, put down their glasses on the table, departed for the bar.

  Shadows in the corners of the room, shifting. Voices:

  ‘They say he lives in an airplane hangar and has food delivered to him, the whole place is empty but for a desk and a typewriter right in the middle of all that space—’

  ‘Writes like Hemingway, standing up—’

  ‘I heard from Carl — do you remember Carl — that he was in Oregon at a bookshop and he found some of the Vigilante paperbacks and they were signed—’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Signed, and he spoke to the man in the bookshop and he told him, he told him there was a man who came in once a month, never bought anything, but after he left all the Osama books were signed. He was dressed like a hunter and drove a pickup truck and he had a cabin in the woods, and—’

  ‘I heard—’ a new voice, a tall thin man with a stoop leaning into the conversation, mug of coffee unsteady in one hand — ‘I heard he was living in the Far East, in Siam somewhere, in an old Buddhist temple in the jungle, all alone but for an old monk who taught him kung-fu, and when he isn’t writing he meditates—’

  A man at a nearby table, twisting his torso, putting thick arms on the table, saying: ‘I heard he lives on a yacht that never comes to land, and he has an army of girls on board who follow his every command—’

  ‘That’s ridiculous—’ from the thin man stooping—

  ‘One girl follows him around with an ashtray and every time he ashes his cigarette she catches it before it can touch the floor—’

  ‘Did you read what Bolan wrote in the Osama Gazette last month?’

  The four men laughing. ‘A woman!’

  ‘Well, Mike Longshott is obviously a pseudonym—’

  ‘It can’t be a woman! The writing is clearly masculine—’

  A red-faced man at the other end of the room, standing up abruptly. ‘Hey! For your information—’

  ‘Oh, hi, Bolan, didn’t see you there—’

  ‘I said Longshott is a woman, and I stand by that,‘ the red-faced man said.

  ‘It’s a long shot, Bolan…‘

  More laughter. Joe, thinking: The Osama Gazette?

  He pushed his chair back, stood up. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. Four male faces turned towards him — reluctantly, it seemed to Joe. ‘What’s this Osama Gazette?’

  The men exchanged glances. Clearly, their looks said, this was a stranger, an outsider in their midst. ‘It’s a fanzine,’ one of the men in the hunting vests said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s a small publication dedicated to a scholarly discourse of the Osamaverse.’

  ‘The w–?’ he decided not to ask.

  The man sighed. ‘You can find copies in the dealers’ room,’ he said. ‘It’s already open.’

  ‘Where’s the dealers’ room?’

  ‘Out of here, go down the corridor past the elevator and it’s the second door on your left.’ He squinted myopically at Joe’s name badge. ‘Joe. Not seen you around before.’

  Joe stared at him, and the bearded man stared back.

  ‘Oh, I’m just a fan,’ Joe said.

  I heart Osama

  ——

  He walked down the corridor and the floor echoed underneath his feet. He tried to ignore the silent figures that stood against the walls, watching him with empty eyes. They were just light falling on dust, conjured by tiredness and caffeine, phantoms that should have been laid to rest in the light of day.

  A notice on the door said, in large, spiky, hand-written letters, Dealers’ Room. He opened the door and stepped in.

  Tables were arranged with their sides touching each other. There were two rows. The room had the half-festive, half-consecrated feel of a Sunday jumble sale. Joe passed a row of dangling T-shirts. One showed two towers and a flying plane; another had the by-now-familiar face of Osama Bin Laden, staring out of 100% cotton. One said I, was followed by a heart, then Osama. I heart Osama. ‘They’re available in black, blue, red and white,’ a woman told him as he passed. ‘Medium, large and extra-large.’

  Then next table had buttons. They repeated the same motifs. The next one had dolls. Numerous Bin Ladens stared at Joe with black button eyes, their soft plush-toy hands limpid at their sides. The next one, books: Medusa Press titles. He picked up one of Countess Szu Szu’s books, leafed through it idly, put it down.

  On the next table, Osama pillows. A sign said, Go to bed with the man from your dreams. But Joe never dreamed any more.

  He found what he was looking for at the end of the row. A solitary man with the same unkempt look as the others he’d seen at the bar was sitting behind a nearly-empty table, making a meal of his nails. He looked up when Joe approached. His name-tag said Hi! I’m Theo.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. Then he went back to what remained of his nails.

  Joe picked up a publication.

  The Osama Poems.

  By Theodore Moon.

  When he leafed to the title page he noticed it was signed, the blue ink smudged across the page. He said, ‘You?’

  The man nodded without looking up, named a price. Joe looked at the first page.

  People fall down like leaves in autumn

  The sky is a haze of smoke, burning red.

  I see you, on the far shore of sleep

  In a place I cannot follow you to

  And can never now reach.

  He put the book down. There were some cheaply-printed, staple-bound booklets on the table, mimeographed runny blue on dirty white. He picked one up. A sense of futility flooded him. There would be no answers here.

  The Osama Gazette, Volume One, Issue 3. A man with a magnifying glass on the cover, through the glass, a miniature city, engulfed in smoke. He looked at the table of contents. Oil and ideology in the Osamaverse. Fictional Wars #2: Afghanistan. Terrorist, Freedom Fighter or Soldier? Osama Bin Laden as a Liminal Figure. He didn’t even know what that meant. The Twentieth Hijacker Hypothesis.

  Put it down. Yet another publication. Osamaverse Stories. On the cover a man with a portable grenade launcher hiding behind rocks, high in the mountains, a helicopter flying overhead. The Fifth Plane, by Theodore Moon. Love in the Desert, by Vivian Johnson. A Cause Worth Dying For, by L.L. Norton.

  ‘You’re going to buy, or you’re just going to read them here?’

  Joe put down the slim book. ‘Just browsing,’ he said, and wiped his hand, surreptitiously, against his side. He turned to leave. There were no answers there. He opened the door and stepped into the corridor outside, and as he walked down it he could no longer ignore them, could no longer pretend they were not there.

  The answers were there, had always been there, only waiting for him to finally face them.

  The refugees lined the silent corridor. Th
ere were men there, and women, and children, and they were the colours of shadows and dusk. They stared at him and their lips moved, though no sound escaped. He felt his heart shudder like an ill bird, straining against the bars of his body. He walked down the corridor and they parted before him, like leaves in the fall. They were many. Too many. He turned his head, left, right, and they looked back at him with empty faces.

  Only one was familiar. He stopped, stared. Black suit, black tie, grey hair — ‘Oh, shit.’ He turned to run, but there was nowhere left to run. A hand on his shoulder — solid, real. ‘Joe.’

  He turned. The man with grey hair looked at him, head tilted to one side. ‘I told you not to open that door…’ he said. He said it softly. He seemed sad. Then he made a minute motion with his head and Joe started to turn, could hear them behind him, knew it was too late even as he —

  ‘Don’t knock him out,’ the man with grey hair said. Something dark and velvety fell over Joe’s head, blocking out the light, muffling sound. He was grabbed from behind, his legs kicked out from under him. He fell, was caught. Was lifted.

  He heard someone saying, ‘What’s going on?’ the man with grey hair replying, ‘CPD.’ Then he was carried, lowered carefully into a small, enclosed space. Something closed shut above him. He thought — the trunk of a car. He heard an engine start off, the vibrations thrumming through the hold. Then the car was moving; it took him with it.

  dark Arabica

  ——

  The darkness tasted like dark Arabica. There was a faint whirring sound far away, like a coffee grinder switched on, turning small roasted beans into a soft dark powder like a cloud-wrapped night. There was peace in that darkness. He was tied to a chair. He had been on that chair for some time. His hands and feet were tied to the chair. There was a sack over his head. It was very hot inside the sack. There were small holes cut into the cloth to let in air. The air tasted unused. The rope, where his hands were tied, cut into his skin. He needed, badly, to pee. His bladder was like a nuclear reactor threatening to go off, unstable isotopes excitable, protective shields decaying. But somehow he felt distanced from his body. Somehow none of the reports sluggishly returning to his brain — the pain in the wrists, loss of feeling in left leg, bladder pressure, lungs rattling like an empty can — none of these affected him. There was drool in the corners of his mouth. When he giggled it came out as a tiny warbling sound through the spit, the sound of a drowning bird trying to sing through water. There was a cold numb feeling in his neck where there had been a short, sharp pain earlier.

  Sometimes the prisoner tried to sing to himself. The songs had no discernible lyrics nor, if only the prisoner had given it thought, any tunes. They could more accurately have been described as a humming, a low, long, constant thrum that could have come from hidden pipes behind the walls, from rows of moving cars somewhere beyond the walls, from the electric charge of storm clouds rubbing against each other in the place where sky-scrapers met the sky.

  Sometimes the darkness that bound him seemed to expand outwards, into an infinite bubble of space, became a silent prehistoric sea through which he swam, as light as loose leaves, though there was never any shore in sight. Sometimes it constricted about him, and those were the bad times, when the darkness shrunk into a tight, hard ball, like the compacted load of a dung beetle, and he was trapped inside it, unable to breathe, his body defined in sharp lines of bright-light pain, in landing strips marking the drunken flight paths of the fat dung beetles. And sometimes it was as if the darkness was a vast abyss, and he was standing on a precipice of black granite above it, looking down, and a word came and floated up at him from that impenetrable vastness, like the name of a world beyond the world, a reality beyond reality, accessible to him only if he jumped. The word was Nangilima; which seemed a nonsense sound to him, like Heaven. It was a made-up word, or perhaps a name heard once and then forgotten, the memory hiding like a dormouse in the recesses of his mind until now, hinting at a world beyond; if only he could fly.

  He couldn’t jump. Unseen wires held him suspended above the abyss, and though he pulled at them and thrashed and raged they wouldn’t break. Then there were more and more periods of grey, patches of nothingness eating at his world, growing bigger, lasting longer, times in which he was nowhere and was nothing, but even those went away eventually and the world shrank and there was pain again, a little at first but steadily growing, the world shrinking around him and over his face. It smelled of dark Arabica.

  clear and present danger

  ——

  Light hurt his eyes. The room seemed to move around him, wouldn’t stand still. He tried to fix his eyes on one spot but as soon as he did the room rotated away in an anti-clockwise direction. His hands felt very light. They were rising up of their own accord. ‘Give him a moment,’ the man with the grey hair said. Joe tried to focus on him but the man was spinning away with the room. Maybe they were in one of those rotating restaurants, Joe thought. Only there were no windows here, and no tables, and no diners, and the walls were stained in fantastical shapes the colour of rust. There was a pair of shoes beside him, polished, meeting dark pressed trousers. He leaned towards them.

  ‘Son of a—’ He heard someone shout, felt something hard connect with the back of his head. Pain again, but all he could do was open his mouth wider, the blood pounding in his head like a jungle beat, as he spewed out a thin jet of foul water onto the floor. He heard the grey haired man’s chuckle, saw one black shoe walking away, leaving footprints of sick behind it. ‘You’ll feel better in a minute,’ the man with the grey hair said. Joe rather doubted it. He dry-retched; there was nothing left to spew.

  ‘There’s a basin to your right,’ the man said. Joe turned his head, blinked sweat away. His eyes slowly focused. There was a concrete toilet hole and a concrete sink and both were decorated with the same rusty stains. He pushed himself up; staggered; ignored the man’s ‘Take it easy, now’; and dragged himself to the sink. The water tasted cool. Its touch on his face hurt, but only for a moment. There was no mirror. He was not unhappy about the fact. The pressure on his bladder returned, multiplied. Suddenly it seemed the most important thing in the world. His hands shook as he—

  ‘There’s nothing like a good piss, is there,’ the man with the grey hair said.

  Joe ignored him. He still felt divorced from his body though the sensation was fading. It was like putting on a suit that had sat in the closet for a while. It took time before you stopped noticing it. When he was done he washed his face again. There was a metallic taste in his mouth. Leaning on the basin with both hands, he turned his head and looked at the man from the CPD.

  Silence stretched between them like the moment between two chess players before a check. Or perhaps it was a checkmate. Joe wasn’t entirely sure. He felt pretty beat-up. He didn’t think chess players usually kidnapped and drugged each other. When he thought about it, chess seemed like a lousy metaphor. The silence, however, stretched. It hung in the air like a delicate kite, assembled with paper and glue and hope, needing only a tiny breath of air to shatter it and send it tumbling. It seemed a shame to spoil it with words.

  ‘Cigarette?’ the man from the CPD said, proffering a pack.

  Joe shook his head, though the movement made him nauseous. ‘I quit,’ he said. The man shrugged and returned the pack to his pocket. Joe stood up, stretched slowly. Aches alternated with numbness, his body a chequered map of opposing states. He patted himself, found a pack of cigarettes, crumpled, and his lighter. Shook one free, put it in his mouth, lit up.

  ‘You said—’ the man with the grey hair said.

  ‘I changed my mind.’ He blew out smoke. A smile left the man’s face. It looked like it had just packed up its bag and moved out for the winter. It didn’t look like it was set to return any time soon.

  ‘How do you like it?’ the man said. His gesture swept over the room. Besides the basin and the toilet there was the chair Joe had been tied to and a narrow bed with a grey blanket and a
pillow the shape of a brick and the colour of a pumice stone.

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ Joe said. ‘Don’t think much of the management, though.’

  ‘Get used to it,’ the man said.

  Joe shrugged.

  ‘I did warn you,’ the man with the grey hair said. There almost seemed to be an apologetic note in his voice; it could have just been an approaching cold.

  ‘Something about not opening doors, right?’ Joe said.

  It was the man’s turn to shrug. ‘Too late for that,’ he said.

  Joe sat down on the edge of the bed. The thin mattress felt like a plank of wood. He dribbled smoke, tapped ashed on to the floor. ‘What’s the CPD?’ he said.

  ‘A committee,’ the man said.

  ‘A committee,’ Joe said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see.’ He didn’t.

  ‘It is a bi-partisan committee on the Present Danger—’ the capitals felt as heavy as lead weights. ‘It was set up to identify and counter the clear and present danger facing our country’s peace.’

  ‘What if there is no clear and present danger?’ Joe said. The man with grey hair shook his head. ‘There is always a clear and present danger,’ he said. ‘And right now, it’s you.’

  ‘Me? I’m only one man.’

  ‘John Wilkes Booth was only one man,’ the man from the CPD said. ‘But no, not you specifically. You, plural.’

  Joe’s cigarette had burned down to a stub. He let it fall to the floor. A look of distaste crossed the man’s face. ‘Refugees,’ he said. ‘Fuzzy-wuzzies. Ghosts. Whatever.’ He looked at Joe steadily. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘You should not have come.’

  The silence was back between them, a flat trampoline, needing only the smallest weight to fall to upset its perfect stillness. The man from the CPD said, ‘This is not your place.’