Fire in the Unnameable Country (12 page)

It was sheer drunken folly at first, when a singularly important effect was introduced to the Games. We can blame chance: a man, a whoever man, nameless and an irrelevant regular of the cage lottery with pinpricked skin on his vermilion cheeks, was accused in Octavio's presence at a garage bar in the capital by some of his friends of having been favoured in the last draw. While the owner sipped his spiked lemonade and tried to take no notice, Vermilion Cheeks walked over and slung his arm over the lottery baron before offering thusly: Give them what they want, boss. Let there be a little cutting if I lose tomorrow. I say the removal of a patch of my arm skin one centimetre squared.

At that moment, a musician with the unlikely name of Elvis was detuning his guitar because he was about to play a bolero, and his instrument drooped the very air. This churned the pit of Octavio's stomach as it laboured to adjust to the atmospheric difference. He
replied he had no intention of changing the simple principle of a game of zero or small fortune. But then he saw the whole bar fall to raucous enthusiasm with desire for Vermilion Cheeks' potential maiming, and he reluctantly agreed for the price of his night's revelries that the wagerer should be removed of his patch of arm skin tomorrow if he did not draw the winning numbers.

The companions of Vermilion Cheeks, who had goaded and entreated him to cast the negative lot, bought more tickets than usual and convinced others to do the same. In fact, more tickets were sold the following day than ever, and out of luck or fear the unnameable individual managed to save his skin by winning a small sixth-place prize of one hundred dollars, which drew cheers and many jeers from the crowd. He won again the next day, the fourth-place prize, and on this occasion he had been persuaded to increase the potential risk to a four cubic centimetre patch and two millimetres deeper into skin.

Soon, superstitious people certain that somehow offering one's body to the draw increased chances of victory began to wager half a head of hair pulled up by the roots, the tip of his nose, the peacock lashes of a young woman, her second chin, a former athlete's chunk of calf muscle, an eyebrow, and later, when distinguished surgeons were also drawn into the fare, an ovary, a testicle, a whole cheek, a fragment of liver, a whole kidney, the fat of one's heart, and worse, far worse. Thus began the long and gory road to the Chance Executions, whose news spread like a disease as intense as the tsetse fly sickness, and which grew in pathological popularity across the classes and walks of life in the unnameable country. Eventually, Octavio appointed an internal committee to decide and regulate the damages, though as a committed democrat he argued that the audience should have a say in the nature of the dispensation of harm, and rented a banquet hall every Friday afternoon so that a privileged number could assemble there and determine the following week's grotesquery.

Things went on like this until the winnings were so large but the losses so much greater, and understand it was the bloodletting that interested people most. A community theatre donated its stage, and there the daily theme of crimson relit the hearts of the young and old alike. They laughed at the ugly man with matted hair like a dog's, whose ear was torn with a yelping cry from his very head by a former torturer of the Black Organs, and who regretted everything at the point of great pain as they all did, they cheered at the fool who had bet his left eyeball to sweeten the pot some one hundred thousand dollars more, and so on.

Things got much worse after a half-dozen men arrived at Victoria with their eyes firmly shut, who did not open their eyes for a moment, arrived dressed in stiff collars and dark suits, and held hands together like children. Without tripping once over their own feet or anyone else's, they navigated by some preternatural instinct, which somehow allowed them to augur potholes in advance and to avoid the dips in the sidewalk and the worst construction areas. They spoke to no one until they came upon the gates of the Presidential Palace. They spoke some words to the guards, which convinced him to/ but that isn't quite right: a cloud of bees coincided with their arrival, yes more like it, and while the men droned on, the guard noticed that the bees were edging ever closer and seemed to be growing angrier and swarming in a larger crowd the longer he tarried: All right, sirs, the guard nervously passed them through.

There were other gatekeepers afterward, as we can expect, and whether this trick was repeated I cannot know, but understand that even while speaking to the Madam in the Hecatomb Office, the six eyeless men did not let go of each other's hands or open their eyes once. The Madam listened politely, and sipped politely the tea from her saucer: half of them were from a multinational cell phone company, the other half belonged to a public relations firm, and together they were ready
to invest billions into the lottery. They had already contacted Maxwell, who had been dumbfounded by the offer, was too goodhearted to be a shrewd businessman and capitulated early in negotiations, they said, and agreed to share power with the government and the sightless strategists in what was to be the greatest experiment in human history since
The Mirror
. After less than an hour's conversation, they convinced the Madam's regime to fertilize this great money plant, to water it wisely, as it would grow inestimable shoots with every cutting gesture.

As the fatal ritual spread everywhere, the six eyeless men worked tirelessly out of hotel rooms and briefcases, and within weeks formed a powerful lobby group with other businessmen that convinced the government to lower the legal gambling age to sixteen, though everyone knew it was possible for even junior high school children to buy tickets. It was a doubly useless manoeuvre since it would soon be impossible for anyone not to buy tickets.

All this occurred around the time I was bewitched by the most beautiful pair of ankles. Whose ankles, Hedayat. Who was Q. Why her ankles, which did nothing but join legs to feet, lower leg bones affixed to talus, articulated with tibia fibula, to form anklejoints that allowed her to hop here and there, to pass across the room in two or three bounds with a perfectly balanced bottle of blood on her head, two in each hand, and several more under each armpit, and a final bottle stowed neatly on the flat of a foot leaving one free foot for hopping.

But you understand: how could Hedayat not notice ankles in the bouncing swift thankless task of rushing about while feeding vampirical ghosts, of simultaneity refraction of time, one Q diaphanous tending to their pillows and another lucid dreaming by the linen closet, finger at her chin, which sheets to gather now and spread them across the floor,
another guiding a ghost patient, a doddering dead Alzheimer man, by the elbow to the right spot, and another image of her elsewhere in the room, hush now, with finger to lips, pouring from the bottle to quiet a flickering woman's bloodlust, her whimpering want for company and conversation before the ashen glow of the television set. What a din they raise, incomprehensible maatal, pagal, crazy for trading the ace of spades for king of hearts or rook for a knight in shining armour smash dominoes down on the sidetable, do this why not, while comparing memories of life or one another's spectral pains, which continue life after death. But who.

Introduce us, Hedayat. How about that one: a once-mirrorwalker you call Fissures, who busted bloody through tain, the metal back of mirror and glass, his face and hands dripping red while travelling from image to undead, nice to meet you sitting quietly on a plastic sheet, sipping a glass of blood, blood like the kind that flows through shardwounds on his body, which only worsen with time. Like the others, he is waiting for his second death. And elsewhere in the room, the name is Rafiq, whose story is simpler: the loneliness of the coffin unsuited him, and he wept for days before clawing digging to make it out. Then some thirty others more, believe it, and Q alone to care for them all. What is the Ghost Hospice. Why the glow of the Ghost Hospice now, excavated out of the desert like a prehistoric whale skeleton, and the beautiful living bones of Q, ankles and all, returned to us.

Have you, Q raises her eyebrows.

Yes, says Hedayat, and removes from his bag the half-kilo of hashish.

Not for me, she gives him a smile.

Oh I never, he swears with a hand at his heart, I didn't. May I, he offers after she sets the package aside, pays him with cash already at hand, before she can return to her fold of tasks.

Bemused, she allows him to take the end of the longest bedsheet in the world. Then, with fingers at each corner, a preliminary arrière-leap by both dancers as time caramelizes, and all the ghosts are watching, slowly, cameras drop slowly from the ceiling to scatter these moving images out into the universe because
The Mirror
knows how to suck the blood out of any spontaneous movement. (Years later, we would claim the Director himself was there to oversee the proceedings.) A flutter and the sheet spreads its wings. Two dancers' leap assemblé to distant music, and Hedayat unwinds the cloth fold after fold, revealing light laughter, the costume beneath. Thus begins their one-act dance whose theme is conversation.

If the two dancers were moving to music in this scene, I forget the name of the piece, I forget the colour of the bedsheets, I remember very little except their movements. Of course, it did not happen this way. Relate the facts, Hedayat. The Secret Trial prefers no embellishments. And yet it was this way, exactly this way; how else to tell a life of many moments except by relating whether one remembers them as beautiful or not.

To tell the truth, I was alone that night, and Masoud was on a delivery. Though he was scheduled for a brief trip, I knew I wouldn't see him for a long time. He had tried to convince me to accompany him, come with me, bhai, on a delivery of powdered milk and bread to a fire-besieged neighbourhood, and truly, when we got to a grimacing street of teeth and armour, of guns, guards in tanks, I thought for a moment about Niramish's uncle's bootlaces in their velveteen packet, thought of saying let's fly this shit.

Go home, he said in the face of my silence, and though at that time we were still living at our respective family residences, I knew what he meant by home. I insisted weakly, let me come, I have all my
papers/ No, man, I know this guy, he pointed to the closest uniformed mustachioed guard ahead of us as the line edged closer to the checkpoint, and he pushed me back against soft silk cloth against bodies in the heat. The crowd enveloped me. From light years away, amidst shapes and sweat, through a hole in an auntie's earlobe, I watched Masoud Rana negotiate passage, bargain skilfully, offer cigarettes, accept a light, buffet interrogation search with twist and swivel words at the guard station, and it was when the mustachioed officer Masoud said he knew started cursing loud and searching indefatigable, where is he, when he started craning neck, pushing people aside with his arms, surveying the congregation of sounds and smells for a Hedayat, that I slipped hands into pockets and whistled quietly away from that barrier between shadow and shadow spaces of the unnameable country. Years later, I would find myself imprisoned and blame Masoud for my entrapment. On occasion, I would think about that time when I should have gone with my friend who did, through his wiles and great fortune, manage to negotiate passage to deliver a miserable package of powdered milk and bread to a school in a neighbourhood whose local grocery store had spontaneously combusted. Masoud Rana went away for a long time while delivering basic amenities to the region, and I didn't accompany him because it was necessary to spend my days with others.

I, meanwhile, went to the Ghost Hospice, also known as the Halfway House, to see the girl I was already falling in love with though I had danced with her only a few times during black-pepper deliveries. On the second occasion she allowed me to fold bedsheets with her, and this time, she greeted me with her spirited embrace, before hours passed as we made the bed, watched ghosts. I asked her of their origins. Many were from the lottery, she said, others poisoned by the lottery, still others had slipped and lost legs on American bananapeel landmines, though truth be told some ghosts belonged to the common aneurysm
and cancer variety of undead. How many ways to die in the unnameable country, Q sighed.