What Strange Paradise

by Omar El Akkad

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Madame El Ward says. “If you want to waste your time chasing a little boy around the island, that’s your decision, but I can’t help you.”

  Kethros sighs. “Yes you can, and you will,” he replies. “And I never said it was a boy.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Before

  A wailing foghorn shook the Calypso’s passengers awake. Mist hung in the air, a clouding thing. A few men yelled and scrambled about the upper deck looking for something, anything, to explain the sound.

  “Stop moving, you idiots,” shouted Mohamed. “You’ll capsize the boat.”

  He pulled out his revolver, but in the darkness only the passengers closest to him saw it.

  A knock to the head woke Amir. He had been resting against Umm Ibrahim, who was also asleep. But the foghorn blast caused her to flinch and in doing so she accidentally kneed the boy in his temple. Both woman and boy sat for an instant in a claustrophobic haze, their eyes open but feeble, the darkness of sleep taken over by the darkness of night.

  “What is it?” Umm Ibrahim yelled at no one in particular. “Are we here? Are we here?”

  “Calm down, lady,” said someone nearby, barely visible from where Amir and Umm Ibrahim sat, but who Amir recognized by voice as Walid.

  Just then a spine of white electricity appeared in the distance, perhaps a mile to the Calypso’s northwest. Slowly it came into focus—pole-mounted lights illuminating the deck of a huge freight ship. Lit this way and from the Calypso’s fog-blinkered view, the starboard side gave the vessel the appearance of a sparse floating city. With barely perceptible momentum it moved at an acute angle to the Calypso’s present direction, such that the two ships were likely to come within a few hundred feet of each other before they passed.

  Some of the Calypso’s passengers rushed to the port side for a closer look at the freighter, but as soon as a few of them changed positions the old fishing boat began to tilt violently, such that many of their belongings dropped and tumbled. A scream let loose somewhere on the deck. Suddenly the passengers began fighting with one another, trying to pull back those who’d rushed to the port side. In the melee, the Calypso shook.

  Amir held on to Umm Ibrahim’s leg. He felt a sharp pain in his foot, as one of the other passengers ran over him in the darkness. As he leaned down to rub his toe, he noticed the ship had developed a heartbeat. A visible pulse rattled the deck floor, the wooden boards dancing ever so slightly, not in time with the passing waves but in some other chaotic measure. Amir lay his head closer to the floor. He heard muffled sounds of distress. From below, the passengers in the lower deck were screaming.

  Through the small slit in the floorboards near where he sat, Amir could see them without seeing them. No more than a thin and rotting deck and a few feet of air separated him from the men and women whose panicked shouting shook the Calypso’s stomach. He felt the breath of them against his cheek, the heat of them, of bodies constrained and blinded. Still, in the black of night he could not see them, and when suddenly the tips of three fingers shot through the tear in the floorboards, Amir screamed and leapt up. A hand, bloody from where it scraped the wood and drew splinters, shot out from below, reaching for him. Elsewhere the passengers were hypnotized by the looming freighter, but Amir could only watch the bloodied hand, grasping at him and then drawing back into the darkness of the lower deck.

  “Sit down, goddamn it,” yelled Mohamed. Amid the shoving and shouting, he pushed his way to the middle of the boat, where Teddy stood at the wheel. Mohamed climbed atop the small roof of the wheelhouse. He stood head and shoulders above the rest of the passengers. He removed his pistol from his pocket and fired a shot into the air.

  The silence that followed the blast was total. Everywhere along the top deck the men and women cowered.

  “Listen very closely,” Mohamed yelled. “If the people on that ship find you, one of two things will happen. Either they’ll call the navy to come arrest you, or they’ll sink you themselves. Whatever lies you’ve told yourselves about the kindness of Westerners, you need to forget that bullshit right now, because I promise you they will do anything they can to make sure you go back where you came from, or else die out here.”

  Mohamed waved his gun across the main deck in a sweeping motion. “So here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to sit back down and we’re going to stay very, very quiet until that ship passes. I don’t want to hear a single one of you breathing.”

  The passengers complied. Now into the second night of voyage, they knew their places well enough to return to them instinctively, and even helped one another inch along the crowded deck. As they resettled in place, none spoke.

  The freighter neared. Amir watched it breach the nighttime fog, its full size coming into view. It appeared to him as the largest thing he’d ever seen, larger than the sea itself. He tried to catch sight of any movement on the ship, any other sign of life, but the lights along the starboard side washed the deck. All Amir saw were stacks and stacks of shipping containers, tall as buildings.

  Soon the passengers of the Calypso felt the displacing force of the ship. The waves rose and smacked the side of the fishing boat, knocking it side to side. The two vessels passed, the distance between them close enough to swim. And then they were behind it, watching the huge freighter slip back into the night.

  For almost twenty minutes afterward, save for the monotonous wheeze of the engine below, the Calypso sailed without sound, no passenger on the top deck willing to be the first to speak, the silence spreading into the lower decks. Some of the men and women who’d been asleep earlier now began dozing off again. The waves settled.

  In the quiet Amir became aware of a smell. It was faint under the weight of the salty Mediterranean air, secondary to the diesel stink and the all-encompassing smell of the sea itself, but it was there, and building. It was the smell of the passengers, the smell of human bodies in need of washing.

  As the boat sputtered along, he sought to pass the time by building in his mind pictures of his mother and baby half brother, and then checking those images against the ones in the bell-shaped locket around his neck. But even when the clouds momentarily parted overhead and the moon swept across the deck, there was too little light to make out the tiny portraits. An inch away, the images were still as unreachable as the backs of clouds.

  Even the sound that came to him from below, so hushed it barely registered, he at first took to be another half-remembered thing. Then he looked down and saw that it came through the gap in the floorboards.

  Quiet Uncle called his name.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “It’s going to be all right—we’re almost there.”

  “Almost where?” Amir said, leaning down until his cheek once again touched the flooring. “Where are we going? What’s happening?”

  “I’m sorry,” Quiet Uncle said. “I’m so sorry.”

  It was only then that a more intimate kind of fear replaced Amir’s confusion. In all the years he’d known Quiet Uncle, he’d never heard from him a sincere apology.

  “Please,” Amir said, “tell me what this is.”

  “I was going to go away,” Quiet Uncle said. “But only for a little while and only to see if it was true, if what they say…But I was always going to come back. No matter what, I would have come back. Do you understand?”

  Amir said nothing. From below and absent light the voice seemed severed from its owner, a letter written but left unsigned.

  “Say you understand,” Quiet Uncle repeated. “Please say you understand.”

  Suddenly a sharp, shrill ringing tore through the upper deck. Amir and everyone around him jumped and once again wrestled impotently with the darkness in an attempt to make out the source of the sound. This time, though, it came from the boat itself.

  “What the hell is it now?” yelled Mohamed.


  “Sorry, sorry,” came a reply in English from the wheelhouse. Teddy hit the alarm clock. “Shift change.”

  Many of the passengers on the upper deck shouted curses at the pilots as one handed over the wheel to the other. The commotion once again jump-started the boat’s lower heartbeat. The passengers belowdecks began pounding the boards.

  “Shut up—go back to sleep,” Mohamed yelled, smacking the deck floor with his boot. “Everything’s fine.”

  The alarm died down but now the deck buzzed with residual adrenaline. Whatever calm had been temporarily disturbed by the encounter with the passing freighter was now gone entirely. The back corner of the boat lit up as Walid turned on the flashlight and placed it in the lantern.

  “Turn that off,” Mohamed said. “People want to sleep.”

  “The people who still want to sleep are going to sleep, brother,” Walid replied. “The people who can’t sleep want light.”

  In the brightening Amir saw that the men and women around him had…he could think of no word to express the change they’d undergone except loosened. Men who had come onto the boat far more formally dressed than this kind of trip required had by now undone the top buttons of their shirts and were using their jackets as blankets and pillows. A couple of the older women who’d arrived wearing hijabs had now either taken them off or turned them into high-riding scarves. So too was evident a melting of the communal posture—people slumped with their foreheads rested on their arms, their eyes cast down to the floor.

  Even in the new light no one in Amir’s corner of the boat felt the urge to speak. Maher, sitting in a cramped space almost directly below where the glass lantern hung, pulled his book out. No sooner had he flipped it open than Walid began peering over his shoulder.

  “What are you reading, anyway?” he asked.

  “The Book of Nicodemus,” Maher replied. “From The Apocrypha.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “The books that didn’t make the Bible.”

  “You want to know something?” Mohamed asked.

  “Not really,” Maher replied.

  Mohamed continued on. “I’ve done enough of these trips now to get to know you people pretty well,” he said. “I can read your future. I can do it by your clothing, by your game plans, what you say you’re going to do when you get over there. But you want to know what the most accurate predictor is? Your belongings, the things you bring with you. And I’m sorry to say, brother, the ones who bring books never make it. They get eaten alive.”

  Kamal, who’d by now also given up on sleeping, sighed. “So you’re a researcher now? You know all that from spending a couple of days with people on a boat?”

  “No,” Mohamed replied. “I know it from afterward too—from when you people call us up asking for help, because you had no idea what you were doing. You thought away was enough. But it’s not. It never is.”

  “Why did you start doing this?” Kamal said. “You’ll drown just like the rest of us if this piece of shit goes under. There’s other ways to make a living.”

  “No there aren’t.” Mohamed pointed behind him, which he intended and all around him understood to be south, the city and the country and the world they’d left, although now there was no telling direction, no telling the places from the emptiness between them. “You know full well that where we come from whatever you end up doing is the only thing you could have ever ended up doing.”

  He turned to Maher. “That’s how I know you won’t make it: you carry stories around. You’ve got a storybook idea about how it’ll end up, you’ve got a storybook view of the world.”

  Maher shrugged. “Books are good for the soul,” he said. “Books will ween you off cruelty.”

  “And what will you be left with then?” Mohamed asked.

  * * *

  —

  Amir sat back against the railing, a dull pain in his midsection. He turned and tugged slightly on the end of Umm Ibrahim’s niqab.

  “What is it, baby?” Umm Ibrahim said.

  “I need to pee,” Amir whispered.

  Umm Ibrahim looked around the deck. “You can’t hold it?” she asked.

  Amir shook his head.

  “All right,” Umm Ibrahim said. She stood, wobbling a little as she sought to keep her balance. Awkwardly she shifted around so that she was now standing behind Amir, and Amir faced the railing, overlooking the sea. In the cramped confines of the deck a few neighboring passengers complained as the woman and the boy moved, but Umm Ibrahim ignored them.

  “Go ahead,” she told Amir. “Make sure you get it all in the water, not the boat.”

  “I can’t go,” Amir said, pointing to the passengers around him, who seemed utterly uninterested in this small spectacle but stared at him anyway because there was nothing else to look at.

  Umm Ibrahim sighed. She turned and yelled at Walid.

  “Hey, you. Give me your jacket.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your jacket, your jacket. I need it to cover the boy up. He has to go to the bathroom.”

  “So let him go,” Walid replied. “Who the hell cares what he does?”

  “Have some decency,” Umm Ibrahim said. “He’s a little boy.”

  “So what? Everyone else on this boat has been pissing without covering up.”

  Walid pointed at the large orange life jacket in which Amir was encased. “He’s dressed like a man, isn’t he? Let him piss like a man.”

  Umm Ibrahim turned to Mohamed. “You want this night to go smoothly?” she said.

  Mohamed raised his hands in a calming gesture. “Give her the damn jacket,” he said to Walid. “It’s just for a minute. Come on, be the bigger man.”

  “Fine,” Walid said. He pulled the crumpled suit jacket from behind his head and threw it at Umm Ibrahim. It came unfurled midair and floated to rest on the floor midway along the deck between them. Three passengers handed it to one another until it reached Umm Ibrahim. She held it and stood directly behind Amir, covering his lower half in all directions but the one facing the sea.

  “There,” she said. “Go on.”

  “I can’t reach,” Amir said.

  With the help of her immediate neighbor, Umm Ibrahim held Amir up from behind so he was elevated enough for his midsection to rise above the railing. Soon they’d succeeded in giving him the clearance he needed. Clumsily and unable to see what he was doing with the oversize life jacket riding all the way up to his temple, Amir finally relieved himself.

  Even though he could barely hear the sprinkle of urine against the sea, there was something reassuring about the sound. Amir could not for the life of him understand why it was so soothing to hear this very faint dribble, which in a way resembled the sound of distant applause, but as the pain receded from his bladder, he felt so much lighter.

  As he finished, a large wave collided with the Calypso’s starboard side. The boat rocked and the two passengers holding Amir momentarily lost their grip. He felt himself tipping forward, as though readying to take flight into the water. He screamed.

  Then Umm Ibrahim caught him, pulling him back onto the deck. The two stumbled backward, knocking into a handful of others and violently displacing almost all the passengers in the back corner of the boat—all of whom, having watched the entirety of this performance, saw clearly the last of Amir’s urine land not in the open sea but all over Walid’s jacket.

  Both woman and boy got up. Embarrassed, Amir quickly pulled his shorts back up and retreated to his corner of the deck. Umm Ibrahim stood up, calmly wrung the jacket out and dropped it in front of Walid.

  “It got a little on it,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Walid picked the jacket up with his thumb and forefinger. He stared at it, and then at the passengers around him, who didn’t try very hard to contain their laughter.

  “Just be grateful
he wasn’t shitting,” said Mohamed.

  “To hell with you,” Walid said. “To hell with all of you.” He turned and with great violence threw the jacket off the boat and into the sea.

  Walid sat back in his corner. As the laughter died down, he stared at Amir. The boy hid his face behind his life jacket and the side of Umm Ibrahim’s niqab but the man would not look away.

  “Don’t worry about it, baby,” Umm Ibrahim whispered, petting Amir’s head. “He won’t do anything.”

  Amir looked upward. “Do you have any more apple slices?” he asked.

  “I think they’re all gone, but let me see,” Umm Ibrahim said. She reached into her purse and rummaged around. She retrieved a mandarin, peeled it and handed half to Amir.

  “Thank you,” Amir said.

  Quietly and unnoticed, he lowered his hand and slipped the fruit through the crack in the floorboard. Below, unseen, a hand brushed his and took it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  After

  Around the back of the gymnasium, away from the main entrance, the guard instructs Vänna and Amir to walk quickly with their heads down. “Don’t stop,” he says. “Don’t stare.”

  Vänna does as she’s told and Amir mimics her, their eyes on the dirt road as they walk out of the facility. As the children leave, the refugees peer from their small, tattered tents to watch because this is what they have become: watchers, honed by captivity into seasoned observers of incremental change. But if any of them sense something odd about the small boy leaving the makeshift pen, none speak up.

  Outside, the day is ending. The sun begins to disappear behind the middle-island mountains, where, Vänna learned as a small child, God Himself was born. The children cross a two-lane road and then a dirt field that ends at a hill overlooking the Hotel Xenios. Whenever the wind picks up it lifts the dust; soon Amir’s legs are coated. By the time they reach the peak of the rolling hill, the sea spread out before them all along the eastern shore, both children are breathing hard.