Fire in the Unnameable Country (10 page)

The higherups were redrawing La Maga to account for the camps of hackneyed snuffpeddlers who couldn't keep out of jail and had to be replaced every few months. Give me more, I pleaded, and Grandfather allowed Masoud and me to seed fallow land in a high-density mirror district, a neighbourhood crowded with fire-besieged spidersilk factories where homes had become accessible only through tunnels.
What we didn't know was that there were residents in the tunnels, and that they were animals.

During one of our trips through the underground passages, Masoud Rana and I were nearly buried with a collection of goats and a young woman who was quietly, poor thing, with Eurydice-steps just behind us, with a hand on her tethered barnyard collection through the tunnels on the other side. As American bulldozers pounded above, the sarcophagus pathway rumbled behind us, the ceiling flung mud in our faces; my lungs then/ a trickle odour of urea and the faint sensation of disappear/ suffocation asphyxiation/ Hedayat began crawling.

Eventually, after a long dark time, after the tunnel behind us became dust, we found the open air breath after sweet breath. The girl gave a livid fucking scream for falling rocks and their bulldozers when we finally surfaced through a hole. So happy was she to be alive she offered us a milk goat, which Masoud and I thankfully added to our meagre assets. What began strictly as a drug trade ended up encompassing and eventually replacing/ we ended up becoming, let us say, crate porters of bread and cigarettes, cakes, baked goods, lettuce, cauliflowers, squash and legumes, pineapples, oranges, whole orchards it seemed some days, to the great disdain of Grandfather and the higherups, who saw no gains in moving away from narcotics.

The goat was the first sign of a good several months, almost as productive as in the days of Niramish; for this reason and because at that time changes were occurring quickly in Hedayat's house, he preferred to hide from them in the Warren entrails. Aunt Shadow's ballooning belly lifted her to soft nest with Samir, curious lover of both punk and disco, to his wall-to-wall emporium where lived a collection of feedback guitar recordings and Euro club hits, which featured a hammock swayed two bodies to single motion sweet melody nightly. Her departure from the apartment above the hosiery shop signalled the arrival of my sisters, the Yea and Nay Quintuplets, whose condition
was bastardy, my fever-sick father decided, who originated from five loins from five fathers make one gravid female, he would mutter, frustrated, out of work until he would meet Imran, otherwise known as Gorbachev, whom he knew as a Screen of the Screens, their motorcycle gang from way back in the day. Gorbachev was now a cop and would one day employ my father in the police force as an archivist due to his knowledge of thoughtreels, which would turn our home into a prison.

Why. Let it be known Gorbachev had struck a deal with the Ministry of Records and Sources to save my father's ass, because thoughtreel theft, though the crime had no precise jurisprudential citation, was governed by Black Organs in the darkest corners of the unnameable country. He's harmless, Gorbachev had argued, see for yourselves.

One day, Department officers appeared at our front door, breezy, talkative, and seated themselves on high chairs at the entrance, before our bedroom doors, and in front of the bathroom. That was when they began demanding identification to travel between rooms in our home, to inspect our belongings, to beep and tell all the metallic items on our persons, from keys to paper clips and pens and bric-a-brac. They arbitrarily arrested my mother, consigned her to the bedroom, suspicious of her true intentions even after she swore for shit's sake, I always do the shop's inventory on Saturdays. They forbade my father from lathering his beard, made him shave with water and salt. When asked why all the regulation, they pointed to departmental procedures until otherwise specified.

My visits home at that time were becoming more and more infrequent. I missed my five sisters' births, the Yea and Nay Quintuplets' nursery hours in my mother's spidersilk hosiery shop suspended in hammocks with juicebottles, their first steps, I missed them crying their rhyme and tell exercises to hearts' content while my mother sold stockings while my father paced the store front to back or paced our home,
frustrated with being reduced to a baker of bread in the kitchen for family meals though he couldn't bear the thought of returning to work in an archive of dead souls. Recall the yet untold past: an unaccountable voice in the wilderness of tape receptacles sings out to my father without warning one day and though he is used to ghosts on magnetic reels on shelves in rows of endless shelves in the Archives his workplace, its insistence I am the dead falls him bedrest down and shivering.

Ghar and bahir: despite/because of great changes in my family and in our house, I was more interested in making a courier's living sufficient income delivering fruit trees and barrels of eats to busted building neighbourhoods full of fire-refugees. One day, Masoud Rana and I received a package with a paintbrush and tunnel map from a friend of a friend of a cousin-associate of Uncleboy. The maze drawing located our subterranean destination with a dot and the inscription sweep aside the fog to find a porthole painted in air. Confused by what was obviously a poetic allusion in a strict literal line of work, we took the task for pay, and curious to observe the underground animals we had heard so much about.

Who are the Warren animals. And what do they claim of the Warren animals. Animals displaced underground by spontaneous fires on the surface is one way to say it. Once upon a time, a bombed and burning spidersilk field fills a hinterland region where men and women run from fire with bags and carryalls as dilated pupils and brown grass growth of fur on human skin; pollen noses twitch lagomorphosis, the sudden appearance of hopping refugees. Or barking order through megaphone raises greymetal glint of gun, turns scared stooping people into newly formed Pomeranians and poodles when the bright lights shine on the grassy knoll. We hear about these things as new animals fill the largest urban centres of the unnameable country fill hospitals without X-ray or ultrasound machines, with only basic surgical equipment, gauze and gloves.

Who were the Warren animals that we saw documented on television, read about in newspapers and magazines. Why the Warren animals. Once upon a time after the annunciation of Niramish, Masoud Rana and I began making a fair living running deliveries through the tunnels beneath the Palisades, the fortified neighbourhoods of La Maga governed by gangs. One day, while delivering two vegetable crates to a place they called the Ghost Hospice/

One sharp turn and deep fall later the world wasn't the same. For one thing, we were rising up the granite steps; clearly we were walking up the steps. But we felt our stomachs rise, saw ourselves descend saw other side of room staring camera and wires empty film canisters cinematic articles of production twisting inverting us with their gaze. We walked the path under its stone arch, its dust and odour in our lungs at our senses until an oblong light in the distance became a man whose face encrusted in flour, who sat on a wooden chair with a donkey's head fresh drip-drip on his lap.

At that time, it was well known Black Organs traversed the Warrens, planted scare-signs, blasted loud music always wafted up through manholes and drainage pipes, so Masoud Rana and I were unsurprised at the donkey's head on a dead man's lap, its drip-drip collecting conical amber sap on floor. We were more concerned with the fog descended over each fallen step behind us, the features of the stairway we had just crossed blotted into mist, as dark outlines of paths we didn't travel drove impossible angles.

In a place of impossible roads and thick vapour, Masoud Rana stopped, map in hand before a door. When we knocked, a rabbit woman stood there nose-a-twitch-twitch, wearing a house-frock, wide-eyed and obviously frightened of Hedayat's beaking lips gnarled hands like talons/ which rabbit doesn't fear an owl. Coasters glasses spoons and books floated out through the door as come in, inside quick quick. The contents of her home settled soft crash when she closed the entrance
behind us as animals found their places again around a table; Masoud Rana and I displayed our bags' contents: carrots mould asparagus for two rabbits gleaming, meatscraps and bones for the dogs in chairs beside them, and grubs for the fish with Fu Manchu moustaches as our hostess disappeared into a kitchen interior of that burrow.

They had been speaking in the interim between raw and cooked foods. Meeting adjourned, cried a rabbit before being corrected other way, madam, by her canine compatriot. Right, she said; class dismissed then, which was of course the other and equally incorrect thing to say. The fish with Fu Manchus broke into raucous guffaw, and I joined them quietly, politely. It was Masoud Rana, with all his anthropocentric prejudice, who asked: So are you all escapees of the zoo.

That's when they emerged as if to a hidden schedule. Hard-hat construction workers dragged planar surfaces into the room, began assembling them loud shouts. Dust rose with their hammering and nailing, shelves grew wall by wall around us with lifted from boxes to stored metal receptacles along rows. We started coughing for all the dust and change; it became difficult to move for all the new occlusions.

Chief Dog, Head of Table, growled piss pus metempsychosis, waved Masoud's question aside with a hand. Today's issue, he said, is rebirth: what to do, he pointed at a pair of grey-dismal spaniels seated near us on the floor, with our fellow metamorphs.

Little Rabbit in Frock who greeted us at the porthole argued the underground conference should continue its regular scheduled program. We've given our floor companions teat to suckle, meat for sup, and bones for grind their demands, she listed. The table has its members already and to make room/

Objection, shouted a tiny poison arrow frog with a booming voice who leapt onto table ex nihilo just in time; each of us need make the slightest space

Bah humbug, interrupted the second rabbit, as dinner wait dissolved into a well-practised cacophony.

After much hard labour, continued Frog, iridescent despite the dim light, brighter than her peers, the spaniels have managed to gather chairs to sit, they demand no more food than the rest of us, and to make room for them would require the slightest shift on each of our parts.

That's when the construction clouds puffed and bulldozers rumbled heavy. The earth shook as new thoughtreel shelves rose so high so suddenly around the table they blocked the artificial lights of the Archives where the animals lived. Once upon a time, fire-fleeing residents of an unnameable country became animals driven underground. Masoud and I would have liked to continue to the conversation on the animals' origins, their previous human lives, to ask why the Archives, with its moth-eaten light, its magnetic reels on shelves, the guns and soldiers that hinted their importance. A thick-armed guard with both hands on rifle-stock lifted his eyes and fired Hedayat a warning glance.

Masoud Rana and I rarely sat at guests' tables after deliveries, we were merely waiting remuneration, and worried for exit as the construction crew enclosed us thoughtreel shelves clanging lot. I became doubly scared when the guards searched Rabbit in Frock's cauldron filled to brim with hot air. Regulation kitchen equipment, she argued, and they tasted a dollop of vapour made from the food we brought.

Fear rose to my throat and I patted the lump in my shirt's secret compartment. I passed Masoud a lace. What is it, he whispered. My grandfather's bootlace. What the hell. They're magic. Are you out of your mind, he lifted his head and looked at the guards creeping closer. Just tie it to your ankle, asshole.

It would have been simpler, I argue, if he had just done as I had asked because mere whispers more were enough to bring them uniforms and breathing down our shirts.

Two guards found Masoud and me sitting strangers, human faces among animals. They pointed bawdy tough, snickered, separated us, lifted me, turned me upside down by my ankles. Loose change, a gram packet of black pepper for personal consumption dropped to the floor. Masoud Rana removed all the couriers' items on his person at firm request, all bags and clips and clasps, all hidden cavities of his backpack found and searched and itemized while we were only trying to deliver foodstuffs to the animals, I argued.

The guards would have none of it, however, and pointed guns: march.

At first, Niramish's uncle's bootlaces fluttered silently behind our shoes, and he's a parlour magician after all, I thought as we remained captured as if without them. The guards kept their guns focused lasersights and forced us walk one dark corridor before the next turn onto another passage of thoughtreel shelves. We passed a figure of a man whole body contorting slow silent scream before reaching an area where the sky breathed into the open underground. In that place they were still mere feet behind us. Then a long, narrow flight of stairs appeared, extended upward for miles.

Masoud Rana's heavy gait and horse exhalations kept rhythm for the march. Time passed and I felt exhausted in the midday heat, so hungry I brought the taste of the steamed air, on which the animals subsisted, to my lips. I thought too bad Masoud and I were handsup and empty your pockets whisked away before eating. While I chewed the thought, Masoud tapped my shoulder look: I turned my gaze to the improbable sight: the guards had been thwarted by our climb though courier friend and I thought we were making casual captured pace. They were miles behind us, running, and their bullets made a racket if you listened carefully. Above us rose easy steps into a hole of sky. That was when I realized the promised flight of Niramish's uncle's gift, its magic beguiling to both wearer and warder.

Masoud and I hugged and cheered our luck and wished the animals well in absentia, Dog and Rabbit Woman and the Fish with Fu Manchus. We bounded up the final steps of the stairway with festive hearts, aided by a gust of good wind. Masoud gave a shout when he reached the surface of the cavity entrance of the Archives and leapt so high he almost snagged the power lines, touched ground with an imp's glee ribald laugh, your grandfather's bootlaces, he yelled: good shit. He jumped again and again and careful, I shouted as he bounded across the moving car road with ease before bouncing in place on the sidewalk for an instant, calling me come on, man, and then leaping loud over houses and rooftops and away.