Fire in the Unnameable Country (26 page)

The sounds joined one another, started and stopped at specific. On their own accord. They turned corners, which led to more of what seemed like the same. But these were no aimless peregrinations.

You can clearly hear the sounds dividing sections, Supervisor said, necessary sounds due to dim lighting in the Archives, which is also necessary in order to preserve the thoughtreels as well as certain photosensitive files, clearly demarcated by acoustic markers examinable by plugging into the headphone jack of any thoughtreel in any region of this library. He demonstrated by removing a set of headphones from his side-bag, and removed a metal receptacle from the shelves. He plugged the headphone jack into the thoughtreel, pressed play, and passed Mamun the headphones and immediate lightningflashes/ sounds climbed dendrites in my father's skull, sounds that flecks of wind, pushed words, and my father could catch them, though most jagged syntax were sliced metal to the ears as nerves grow leaf and sepals from the bones in his hand. My father nearly lost his balance as tissues moved, murmured, partial thoughts appeared, and when taken together
left the sense upon removing headphones: my body, a bloody wasteland, Mamun Ben Jaloun heard someone else's thoughts say to him. You can one-by-one the minds of the 1920s when you walk along their shelf alley, Supervisor said pleasantly; catch the brass band cacophony sometime, he pointed when they got to reels from 1940 to 1950, which sometimes sing, informed Supervisor, while on other occasions you'll plug into a dead note, he continued, meaning this is what remains of my brain. Then there are times, Supervisor lowered his voice, as he kneaded a sound with his hands, kesh-kesh-kesh-kesh-kesh-kesh-kesh-kesh, he kept saying, before informing my father that Black Organs had gathered minds over decades and organized human remainders into an order that seems confusing at first, but you will get to know this system, Mamun Ben Jaloun.

My father fumbled through his own bag, I don't have a notepad, he apologized for all the lost/ But Supervisor waved, one must remember. Eventually, you will be provided with a penlight, Mamun Ben Jaloun, when you have to gather specific records and bring them upstairs for investigation.

I don't understand what these records specify exactly, and what is a thoughtreel exactly.

Have you heard of Department 6119, Supervisor used the moniker employed commonly by insiders, and which, because my father had been transferred indoors after first having served as a gun-toting government employee, a guard protecting the crown of offices and corridors against smoulder streets of the descendants of Bemis or Illium or Dictum or Amun of the Maroons, whose once upon a time is necessary to understand why the unnameable country remained a hothouse and who today still screamed as droves in outdoor voices about their respective contemporary dilemmas and grievances, should have known. Supervisor pivoted on his right foot so that he was now directly turned toward. He stood a full foot taller than my father and
his shoulders were so robust and his nostrils so wide that in the strange light he appeared more minotaur than man.

Of course, my father said.

Of course, Supervisor said after a pause and a squint of areyoulying eyes. The thoughtreels are recordings of Individuals of Interest to the State, he informed my father.

Recordings of their minds, you mean.

Precisely.

I don't understand.

Supervisor cast a sidelong glance as if to indicate are you daft, have you never swung on the grapevine of rumour, what social animal are you, and explained that the process was complex and for the most part classified to employees of the Archives, even to himself. If you must know anything further, understand that we are the colon of the Ministry of Records and Sources, he continued, and after us it is only the incinerator or the sea.

They walked corridors lit by red obelisks, and as they walked, all the thoughtreels crowded incomprehensible, murmur on shelves. And though every so often a sound would ring out to inform them of which region of the Archives they were traversing, it was difficult to differentiate clime and era, the decades of thought.

Do you have any more words, Supervisor asked.

Slight hesitation, and then: when do I start.

Right; you will begin at seven-thirty sharp tomorrow.

Must we ride the dumbwaiter again, my father trailed behind.

Supervisor: Like always.

Time passed and the tiny flat above old Mrs. Henry's hosiery shop grew reordered. The last residents, who, according to their remaining
belongings and their briny lingering odour, were quite possibly nautical pirates, grew less dense and the new family asserted its presence. The cats were reduced to two in number, a tabby and a tortoiseshell, the rest of them given away to neighbours or rendered destruction, while the cockroaches were driven to ruin by Shukriah's introduction of jumping spiders. The old plumbing, which had been clogged for years by knotted and compressed hair, was cleared of its obstructions and no longer beleaguered them with thick gurgling sounds at night, while due to frequent nationwide power outages their home was occasionally plunged into darkness and they outlined the apartment with so many wax candles in preparation that Mrs. Henry, during a short visit upstairs, remarked that she had not laid eyes on such a collection since her father's wake in a Roman Catholic basilica.

The combined income of Mamun Ben Jaloun and his partner (let me inform that the pair were not husband and wife and would never feel the need to formalize their relationship with the weighty consecration of marriage) allowed the twins Reshma and Chaya to attend school, who both showed promise, as they focused their indefatigable lightning energy toward scholastic diligence.

At first, Mamun Ben Jaloun would tell stories about his strange job: And then I have to crush into the width of a tiny crevette, he would crouch low as the girls giggled and clapped and assailed him with questions about the specifics of the dumbwaiter, which they wanted desperately to ride and he promised them one day they would, though he always stopped short of mentioning the smells of the archives or the reels to which they were appended, and not because he himself did not exactly understand their significance.

At that time, there was no shortage of food in the house, and Shukriah and Mamun felt so much love for each other it was often impossible to restrain their fingers, like anxious anemone caressing and kneading, for they had at most a few hours in the week to themselves
alone, when they sent the twins to the neighbours' with a rice pudding bribe, go play, they would pat them on their heads before diving into their sea's desires, which were no secret to anyone, and which made the neighbours laugh, since their noises could be heard all the way from Xasan Sierra's cigarette shop as well as five hundred metres in every other direction. The apartment would grow so humid with their lovemaking that snails would take up residence and crabs from the Indian Ocean would find their way inside by scuttling under the door. Then the couple would be forced to throw all the crustaceans into a boiling pot and open all the windows in a desperate attempt to aerate the rooms before the twins returned.

Their lives were so self-enclosed, so obsessed were they with their delighted repetitions, that they could not have desired anything more, and it was not altogether surprising when Shukriah announced one day that she was pregnant. Mamun Ben Jaloun had the sense and muscular composure to pull up his brows in time to forget for one moment how would the family support another child, and he feigned unfettered joy as the young family celebrated with neighbours for seven non-stop days, lighting ribbon flares and green chili firecrackers and explosive candles of coloured light, as everyone feasted on sweets until sickened.

It was around the time the unnameable country's debts could no longer be accommodated by the Soviets, and against the Kremlin's severest warnings, the President felt forced to meet with a team from the International Monetary Fund that had been hounding him for years like leprechauns that would turn up in the maid's sweepings from under the armoire, would appear out of banishment unannounced at his door with please accept this gift a block of hay and a bag of oats for the first lady Dulcinea, or would whisper pss pss suggestions from the corner of his skull even during meetings and sheepishly adjust their ties when he thundered how in the world did you manage until, finally, when their buzzbuzzing became impossible to avoid and the country's fiscal
situation turned utterly unmanageable, he agreed, okay let's break bread together at the same table and draw up a Hollywood structural adjustment policy of metamorphosing La Maga into a vast film set, thereby inviting all the vultures of the world.

Recognizing his preternatural paranoia and trying to allay his concern that film types were naturally rebellious—just recall what I had to do in La Maga, Misters Brown and Golgotha as well as you others whose names I do not remember since there are so many of you but you all leach my bones the same way and speak in an identical mosquitopitch English—the sixteen pupilless economists all shook their heads in unison and offered that, in fact, the changes they wanted would deepen the President's capacity to bestow order onto the parts of the country that were rebelling against his rule, and the money, Mr. President, as they snapped open a dozen briefcases simultaneously, just think.

Not one of them, however, could have predicted the thick resistance from the student union of La Maga Technical Institute, which began organizing rallies and circulated petitions to remove the Director from the city and shut down production of
The Mirror
, which was the name of the film. Recall that early in
The Mirror
's invention, when its dissolution was still possible, crowds of non-unionized oil workers, unemployed graduates of the humanities and social sciences, teachers, garments workers, members of the nomadic community, all of whom had been deeply affected by its damming of the Jubba River to create a biblical flood scene, gathered by the tens of thousands before retreating, burning and bleeding from rubber-bullet wounds and tearing from the eyes from the putrescent gas hurled into their faces by the shielded exoskeletal constabulary. Firehoses and the threat of the fire next time will not be so merciful: recall the movie crew also set fire to whole neighbourhoods to dramatize the destruction of La Maga Studios by the American bombings; to be clear,
The Mirror
wanted to recreate the unnameable country from the beginning to its prophetic calamitous demise irrespective of cost,
whether monetary or in corpse-form. In order to bewilder and entrap the locals, for a filmic reason was never established, old alleyways were proved without warning one day to be false, as someone (anyone, an empty word meaning many people) saw extending before him the path to his home, the one he had every day travelled for maybe twenty years, but this time his nose banged into glass and he realized the door before him was reflection, another trick of the mirrors.

From warehouses like that of Augusto's, inestimable mirror-walls travelled in coffin boxes throughout the city, and with the addition of smoke and light and the incessant camera gaze, the locals forgot the feeling of living real lives. Recall, because they remain, checkpoints were re-established throughout the city and guards patted down and searched everyone for weapons just as they did before Independence. Unemployment skyrocketed and the mirrors became more than a nuisance, grew into the means by which to restrict food supplies and flow of other necessities. Since La Maga residents could not be trusted, employees from Bangladesh, Bhutan, across the border Ethiopia, down south Somalia, from Vietnam and China arrived to take up jobs boarding up neighbourhoods with reflective walls until the city began to resemble an impassable funhouse.

Some people became incapable of understanding the differences between their moving bodies and their reflections and turned mad from looking at themselves all inverted reduced enlarged reflected every day. Still others died of natural causes, but continued living reflected lives in the mirrors, having forgotten the natural course of their bodies through time; one saw dead people walking in the souks, talking with the living, reaching out for plums through the looking glass, frustrated by their inability to touch anything in the world. Astonished, their families became confused about whether to mourn. Then several hundred cats died of a mysterious illness, and the stench of desperation could be detected even on the breaths of the most resistant of the city's
intelligentsia, some of whom began to believe in the invincibility of
The Mirror
and argued that since the film was meant to be the longest ever in history, all fragments of the recorded images could prove useful to the production, even its possible defeat.

A cult of the Director sprang up and some young people claimed the resistance was a vain attempt to curb Progress, that the Soviets had directed the course of the nameless country's history for many years without significant improvement in the lives of ordinary people, so why not now the West.