Fire in the Unnameable Country (13 page)

Because life continued all around her, Q, the operator of the Ghost Hospice, didn't believe in the sanctity of death, because she knew about other deaths more devastating than the first. The rope of her hair tossed as she worked, and the whole Hospice echoed her hum and song. Why do they go on living, I asked her. Others remember them or they remember being remembered, and thusly, the living enliven the dead, she shrugged. On occasion, she said, it's jor or jeed that persists beyond life, the sheer strength of will, and some of them say to me they would prefer even the worst parts they were denied when death hissed out in army uniform or exploded suddenly around them: the decay and vanishing of old age they never got to experience. Those were some of her answers as we folded sheets bobbing, humming goongooning fly you to the moon as Sinatra crooned vinyl, our fluttering feet never descending from above the floor as filmic reconstructions,
Mirror
sequences, have no doubt narrated. How beautiful Q's ankles were.

I spent that night at the Ghost Hospice as I had done before, but on this occasion, without Masoud's company. I slept in the storage room with cleaning supplies and shelves full of blood bottles, in a hammock. I lay awake all night listening to the sound of spiders knitting clouds from floor to door to ceiling.

When Masoud was away, I began to neglect my business and to spend all my time with Q. There was simply too much work at the Ghost Hospice, too many words. Q and I funnelled blood into bottles, which arrived in vats off the backs of vans once a week.

What kind of blood.

Human.

Really.

She wouldn't verify and smiled mischievous. I lifted her chin up to the light and her smile overflowed.

There was much to do: drugs and palliative care to provide, liquid meals to prepare, we had to endure the peregrinations through hell that every ghost, no matter how well adjusted to a second life, disappeared into, foulmouthed and overflowing. And then one day, to deal with the inevitable: an errant touch or a sheet of sunlight too heavy, and burst into ash with a slight rotten odour, which meant one had to sweep up ghost ashes and perform the rites appropriate for a second passing. But time passed as we did these things and watched these things together, and the Ghost Hospice filled with our love.

Then one day, a fee fi swing of the front doors and a giant interruption in the form of a business partner and friend, Masoud Rana swinging arms, knocking over this and spilling that, pissed is what, why weren't you there, hear him asking me, forgetting he was the one who told me not to follow him, yet remembering correctly, however, that I should have protested rather than assented to his request. Why didn't you help me, he empties the refrigerator to find a cold soda. Where were you when I descended the longest line of stairs with a barrel at my back, a uniformed Uncle trailing, forcing me to traverse corridors where radio antennae swoop silently and suck up the tiniest particles of thoughts.

How was it, I grinned all bhai-bhai and shit, did you deliver the milk.

Yes, he said soberly, milk and bread both, he said, and sipped his soda, heaving, sobbing. Before narrating his return trip across the checkpoint he told me another story first, this one about how last night, he slept on the floor of a classroom next to a teacher who let me into her abode, he said, after long wander in brick and pothole streets with dinner supplies in my backpack. I arrived after a night's interrogation in the early-evening sunlight still so incendiary you had to gambol across hot hot sands after congested minivan ride that left you staring at houses converging streets, wondering which was the house with
the ram's head knocker that had ordered powdered milk. I asked this person that person, touched invisible coins with fingers, I paid a man that sold iced drinks who told me where, and there she was, I finally saw her through a mouth-open front door, there she was nesting hungry students, infants spread out on the floor around what turned out to be her bed, a thin central mattress and sheet, while older pupils slept in a column of hammocks suspended from the ceiling, each level accessible by stepladder. Since I brought bread and powdered milk, she was able to provide a rudimentary meal for the kids, some of whom had to be awakened for the occasion, and with the remainder of the milk and bread, she began hatching a dessert using eggs and sugar she had on hand, which she said would make a tasty breakfast on the hotplate near the back of the classroom. What is the name of this place, I asked her while she cooked. It used to be called Epsilante, she said, home of traditional spider harvest. And now, I asked her. Ask the Director or Xamid Sultan, head of National Security, she said, or the Americans, she laughed a little too loudly, looked around to catch waking eyes, put a hand up to her mouth.

Masoud told the tale with his usual swagger, in real time so moments weighed life's minutes, and we listened as we ate after our day's work. At a pause on fork and plate, with a cough, Q left came back with a shine tilting right left right left in hand, sat beside us and what's that, I asked. I took the winning lottery ticket from her, an old kind like the ones you could buy a long time ago, and looked at the holographic image of New York City skyscrapers pawing clouds in three-dimension photograph above date and time of flight, gasped, you're shitting me, I said. Many years later, I would shiver thin T-shirt in air-conditioned airport with face pressed to fog window glass, weeping blood from stomach wound while watching Q depart forever, but this time we talked tongues, as here, she mumbled here, onto my mouth
in damp light. I didn't argue with her as, hand in hand, we departed Masoud's company/ where the hell are you two/ never mind, she told him as she pulled me toward the interior of the Hospice.

Time passed and Masoud Rana and I saw less of each other. He knocked now before entering the Halfway House, while recently, he would have burst door heaving rabbithaul by scruff of its neck: See what I bring you, he would have announced, before throwing a pound bag of herb on kitchen table or a thousand-dollar catch of bills. Q and I had become inseparable and he remained incorrigible in his bahir and black-pepper ways. Although she and I lived grant to NGO grant, cans of tuna, two pita bread meals a day, her sheer determination and ebullience was food enough for me.

Time passed and one day, the television told us the Americans were adding a vast prison facility to the old tapereel Archives of the Ministry of Records and Sources, which had been replaced by newer technological surveillance facilities, to house accused terrorists outside the jurisdiction of sunlight and beyond even the sight of God, and that this act of the central government had aroused in the people a desire for rebellion unknown since the first days of
The Mirror
. One hundred thousand people had taken to the streets and Victoria University and La Maga Technical Institute had once again become heated centres of resistance.

Recall at that time, however, we were all much weaker than when the Director first arrived. By continuously watching and recording us in filmed instalments,
The Mirror
demoralized and weakened the spirit of the whole population; it made us wish shadows could be exchanged between people, or that the art of ventriloquism had developed to a point where one could throw one's voice beyond reach of the microphones.
The Chance Games, meanwhile, as they were also called, had reduced all our focus to the immediate present, destroyed most links with the past and nearly all understanding of a future beyond the petty goals of the Cola prize or the avoidance of glass shards in an unfortunate can of coffee crystals, and which led at most to winning more cans and therefore to more tickets and, more than anything, to an infinite increase in the discourse of cars and houses, which could also be won, and which we were all supposed to want.

The public removal of body parts still played a large role in the lottery, but since everyone now played the game, winnings and losses needed to be democratized, by which I mean distributed to all possible products, especially those eaten or imbibed. Cancer rates surged, infant mortality grew up into a bigger crisis, tumescent hidden organs burst one day; some people died and others hid in living death as more and more ghosts wandered the mirrors of Victoria and Benediction, Conception, and La Maga. No one blamed the Games because every day someone won, we were always winning, and no one noticed when it was no longer voluntary to have a centimetre patch of skin or a hidden organ removed from inside you. The maniacal jingles of the lottery sang into our very bones from television commercials, the talons of the billboard ads for consume victory enjoy removed your eyeballs well before the assigned date for the operation, and the carnival was spinning round and round and round its own ashes. The people of the unnameable country retained enough sense to understand the greatest prize was meant to be the perpetual lottery itself, to whose vast amphitheatrical sacrificial stage dutifully followed those whose numbers bespoke gallbladder removal, or give us a twisted rib lest you wish to be hounded by the Gaming Commission or the constabulary.

Yet we could do nothing because what wasn't the Chance Games. What went beyond it. Even its founder, Octavio, who had previously
had the softest of demeanours, grew hardened by his experiment with wealth. He had never imagined success in the manner of everywhere tentacles, and the scaffold-stage of great violence, which, it was true, he had encouraged at the start, but only because he had trusted the people and confused the perverse rule of the gladiator mob for democracy. He no longer frequented the capital's garage bars for fear of being thronged, either kissed endlessly by women who could never turn his heart or strangulated by his enemies, though he still preferred his lemonade spiked and to drink alone. All his old friends deserted him at the unbreathable upper atmosphere of exorbitant wealth, and his only remaining companion, Maxwell, was by then an altogether different person also: thin and the wearer of a wiry moustache and speaker of fluent Arabic and Somali, a member of Parliament, who went by the name Abu Yusuf, though he had remained a grey eminence hidden organ and still as influential as ever. His hair had rapidly greyed from encountering all the hatred in the unnameable country, but he tirelessly dyed it black every morning and retained his indefatigable spirit by convincing himself that he was still young.

I'm sad, friend, Octavio said to him one day.

Maxwell, however, as if he were merely reading contemporary events like they had been written many years ago, performed the rite of exegesis and claimed to Octavio, You have no reason to be sad, why you're the owner of the greatest Mammon temple overflowing with riches and blood.

You can take all that shit if you want, friend, but I know the lottery is a cancer that neither I nor anyone could stop if we tried.

Maxwell sighed, recalling it was what others had said of
The Mirror
many years earlier. Many years earlier, in my father's time, our country began becoming a movie set. At that time, when the Director came, the streets were knitted labyrinths through which motorcycle goondas with
swift ballet slippers leapt onto Honda seats. In smoke and growl wall and gravel landscapes, National Security Service battled communists the way we fight terrorists today, pored minds by shortwave to understand who might be responsible for the latest inexplicable fires.

GANGSTER - STEPS

BACKSLANG

Hedayat's bustle and trade happens in such streets. Dense with movie cameras and mirrors, they make you wonder how an owl with eyes and ears so knowledgeable could be so clueless about the exact stuff of the movie's construction. What is
The Mirror
, Hedayat, and what do they say of
The Mirror
. When did the movie that caught us in lenses on film stock on feed and take-up in magazines whirring mile after magnetic mile: when did it all begin.

Was it
The Mirror
when my father and the Screens and their thousand and one flights on motorbike.

Recall, as the story goes, they were hustling, glossolating, talking talk betting organs in the unnameable country before the lottery, even before mirror-walls in the streets began multiplying spontaneous fires in front of movie cameras. Son to father isn't the usual journey in a family history, but the unnameable country necessitates gangster-leaps backward. To know Hedayat requires us to know his father, to understand the father means we travel labyrinth streets to the grandfather, to
understand whom requires us to move back still to great-grandfather unto mist and the origin of things: to once upon a time.

After saying one or two things about the son, let's learn about his father.

While Ben Jaloun the son prefers to cart his toxicological vegetable wares through the Warren tunnels by foot, the father survived an era when death was dynast on the back of a motorbike.

How could you remember chiaroscuro: the play of line and shadow, figures in the lamplight. Why. How. Who dares cross these Stygian waters. A sickbed. An ill woman. What about her. A common scene. For a week this poor woman has been unable to rise from the horizontal or to take anything but small sips of water. The doctor has blockaded himself in his clinic with all the relevant drugs, suddenly afraid of being afflicted by the influenza epidemic that rages throughout the unnameable country. Neighbours from the same tenement have identified death's rattle, and gathered around arguing hissing about which religion's last rites should be deployed. The Hindus claim her as one of theirs; her father was Muslim, reminds the camphor-wielding wife of a huzoor; she lived with a Christian and bore a child by him, declares another correctly. Thusly they debate her passing as she rattles on, and as someone watches by the corner, surrounded by a crush of older adolescents.