Fire in the Unnameable Country (37 page)

Bovaire, he identified the doctor by name when the latter entered.

The one and only, the mustachioed and so forth doctor announced.

Bovaire, Quincy coughed, medic and healer, he laughed and coughed and hurt himself further by these efforts. One of the brightest doctors of the French army once upon a time, we should add during the pneumonic tumult. Stethoscopes were removed.

Inhale, said Bovaire. Cough for me. Urinate. Do as, he ordered as men in his profession have the right. He removed a hypodermic for a painkiller.

Whatever was the illness—and there were various possibilities bandied about and not worth repeating—no one could keep Quincy from Caroline Caroline Caroline Caroline he drew strength from the refrain while stumbling searching for his redcoat with the golden
epaulets. Ass and stubborn fool, Bovaire replaced the hypodermic into his case after the shot, you'll meet your death out there.

At that time out there a congress of Maroons was happening without anyone knowing. There were discussions in the crevasses and grey craggy rocks of who would play intermediary and negotiate with the slaveowners. That was when Amun modified a rifle that could spit no more for a box of empty bullets to fire buttons and rocks, suggested raids of Quincy's and surrounding landowners' estates to collect spiderthread and spiderlooms to design a tripwire system to tell them of near dangers. The Maroons amassed an inventory of blankets rope spoons pots cauldrons gourds twenty horses, and began trading with a community of neither slaves nor landowners, from whom they acquired sharper swords and heavier weapons.

They invented hymns at firelight sang questions who takes from darker races/ does he leave as good and as much from others, continued into daylight their lyrics recollecting fetid slave ship journey aboard Quincy's SS
Nothingatall
, their sudden return to the estate and field-burdens, and thus they continued, with Amun singing loudest like Satan in the conference of the one-third before overthrowing God in heaven, sowing discord and speaking of freedom as if it was too many things to be only the right fruit from the right tree.

Caroline's tent folds opened to reveal the slave that had been in congress with the others, who stood before her burning words. His words moved the lone kerosene flame lamplight tremors, and Caroline Margarita watched my great-grandfather Amun, watched the way he gestured, took a page from a book she might once have crossed, listened to his mixed metaphors stirred up a strange blood music. She noticed the words when he paused would continue humming inside her. That night, she dreamed a great walnut tree husband Quincy felled and felt every axe swing as if she were the walnut tree. She felt her feet and toes turning into its uprooted roots. She awoke amidst a blaze as
the walnut tree burned a fever inside her. She sat up and drank from the gourd of water by her cot, asked for water again and again.

Are you ill, asked the guard that had been posted.

What is the next stage, she asked.

I'm sorry, but I'm unauthorized to reveal any information.

A-O-I A-O-I

Quincy's men stormed the encampment and found mist and charcoal, embers and the remainder of fires, embers and not much else. Ellipses communicated via wireless radio—a monstrous new instrument that appeared to have conquered distance—from the back of a mule.

Quincy's hepatic fever had lessened, but left him weakened, incontinent, babbling brook rushing riverine words headlong over words who knew what meaning. Others took his place on the hunt for the missing slaves, three-quarters infantry and several hundred strong, with eighty dogs hot on the trail.

To disclose the name of the leader: Bemis, himself an owner of five thousand indentures and slaves, and the conjurer of elation: aha, he says at his dogs' discovery of a close trail. And yet dismay would be more proper: ambush.

A hail of stones and fire, the whizzing of combustibles. Rusty blades pounced and Bemis realized his party should not have come to this valley, where they were now encircled in turbid swampy lowlands.
Their horses' feet sunk into the clay, while gunners struggled to position their weapons, finding no solid footing.

They killed themselves, historians would later write, by friendly fire. Twenty-five Maroons also perished, but their numbers are another story. Stories of the Maroons' victory burned throughout the nameless country. As if an alarm had been sounded, deserters from numerous estates found their way miraculously to the rebel camp, with clothes on backs, with metal plates in their mouths, and what else.

Caroline by this point had been given an administrative position; she wrote it all down, their names, their names prior to arriving to the unnameable country on the SS
Nothingatall
, the names of their owners before desertion, whether they could contribute culinary, medical, or literary skills among useful attributes, and whatever else needed to be written down. She exchanges her only dress for a simple coarse cloth because it's what everyone else wears, and begins diligently to obtain the confidence of the rebels, who, aside from Amunji, who hawks over each of her decisions, see her as an administrative fulcrum necessary for the rebellion. But she is nimble, pushes deftly aside by acquiring the favours of one or another of the higherups. The pushandshove generates a strange friction between them. Rumours of lipstick and sametent night-excursions emerge, although both provide believable alternative explanations.

Then one day there is a sound. And then they all stand and point and wonder of possible sky meanings what could this cloud-dust at a single-propeller British aircraft indiscriminately showering school-age photos of Caroline posing in front of a chocolate fountain higher than a grown man and at Caroline and John Quincy younger and living together in various shades brighter than this hard earth and humble bread on which she subsists and for which she gives her solemn mysterious thanks in silence. She realizes she is famous, simultaneously a missing person and a fugitive, a curious somebody worth something
ex nihilo, quite unlike the whole minuscule British protectorate, so nascent it had not yet time to be properly born, to be named or counted among the nations of the world.

Not too long after, the British prime minister rushes frigates and dreadnoughts to its shores while war is waged all across Europe and new inventions for the people's betterment are brandished reflective clean before being exploded smithereens. Aviation had begun only several years prior in an American desert, and due to some ingenious individuals had already started to benefit humanity. As the small plane flows above their heads some shots are fired, all miss, and the pilot does a dosedo once around the crowd before climbing over the clouds and into the horizon.

Hemmed against the Gulf of Eden, the Maroons realized they had grown reliant, in previous months of internal resistance, on surprise fires within the estates, on small groups of indentures or slaves driving off landowners with pitchforks and shovels, and the more recent developments: platoons were being found out, their impromptu stratagems predicted, their locations on the tiny patch of land identified.

Years later, a frightening tyrant identified for the time being only as the Governor would imprison himself in a large house known as the Peacock Palace, where he would discover and fall in love with the forever-embalmed Caroline Quincy, and whence he would order the construction of a large-scale map destined to theatreswallow all of the unnameable country, to transform the country into a map itself, a simulacrum, but that is a larger and later story whose particulars Hedayat has no time at present to recount.

More important, there is a funny, if you will consider: Quincy has become a bambacino since the gone of Caroline, a big baby who has transported all his favourites, including his gramophone and Eddie Cincinnati records, two life-sized soldiers pirated from Kublai Khan's tomb, as well as an ensouled pair of mechanical birds named Q and
A, gifted to him by a Swiss cuckoo clock maker. He babbled and bored with the figurines in time, installed actual men as the play figures of his imaginary warcraft, while there raged a real conflict just outside.

Bemis, among other generals, would visit the infantilized leader and interpret his desires from the movements of the simulation.

I'm tired of playing with cavalry, Quincy said to Bemis one day. In Europe they're doing it on the wing.

The Great War is over, his friend reminded. And we have aerial transportation in the continent, you should know.

Quincy rubbed his eyes as if emerging from under a mountain of years. He realized his amnesiac recession had turned the clock back to childhood nowhere but in his room. Take me to Admiral Mulligan of the British Navy, he ordered Bemis, who abided.

He drove Quincy in his new combustion-engine Ford with the mahogany sidings and a foghorn. They beep-beeped their way through the upanddown roads, which had not yet been paved and were strewn with ditches, some dug by Maroon saboteurs and others by counter-revolutionaries, each for the purpose of cutting the other's flow. They arrived at the estate of a fellow pirate and slaver by the name of Juan Ignacio Baltazar, who welcomed Quincy like a long-lost brother.

You look like chicken soup, Baltazar told him, and it was true: the illness had rendered the once merelythin pirate chesthollow gaunt and withered of his internal organs, out of whose eyes there issued water as if he was a feathered sufferer of fowl pox. All true, he looked like shit, but his presence in a room stuffed with British officers engendered silence and awe. They had heard stories of his travels and travails like Noah, his choices of the right flora and human animals for the new colony, and though some did not believe in the dream wars between knave and master, all had followed the stories on newspaper and radio. John Quincy received a standing ovation when he entered the room because he was famous and important. He was shown aerial photographs of the
indentures' and slaves' last known whereabouts, an updated map of the still-nameless country was unfurled, for which the walls between three rooms were required to be demolished, and which created a new playspace for Quincy's man-sized figurines.

What we need, Quincy said, is a list of everybody—every slave in every estate.

How, they asked. Tell us, they implored.

Quincy responded by shrinking to a size that befit the map, which, though large, was still smaller than the unnameable country. When he rose again before the astonished crowd, he produced a single word they all agreed as the solution: Caroline.

Within hours, a plan was incubated and beaked out into the world as a quiet and assertive little bird. A young corporal sergeant named Thomas, with a long slicing jib that punctuated his ability to penetrate enemy minds, had been recruited for his heroic reconnaissance exploits in doubleyou doubleyou one, and made to wash up on the nearest shore to the Maroons' camp.

To the question who are you, I am, he began, and pretended to play wounded. The trick was to present himself as an indenture though he was clearly an imposter. He had a splint on his legs and his ow ow ow ow ow caterwauling saved him from the truth.

I believe him, said Caroline, he looks hurt.

Though he's obviously lying, said Amunji.

I believe otherwise.

Some were stunned, though others remained unsurprised, having awaited exactly such a revelation of what they believed were her turncoat true colours. In time, she had become a much-needed functionary, a channel by which the revolution—which Amunji and the other higherups had upgraded from the status of rebellion, because these days it was bloodier still—could work at all, through her hands working numbers and tables all day, digesting and dispensing data,
storing whole ranks and files inside her skull. They relied on her for the facts on the ground to enable the strategies of battle. In short, her opinions mattered.

What do you believe, Amunji asked.

That he knows Quincy, and that we should drain him of all that he knows.

On this point they argued, because it was dangerous to have one untrustworthy affiliate (meaning Caroline), the revolution could not risk another. Besides, what could he know; they all turned to look at his meek eyes, which revealed only pain, and his twisted mouth, which in pain grimaced from his busted shin. They never got to grill him properly because someone entered the conference tent and informed that spies had detected her from nearby waters. The Maroons, who were afraid of the sea because it reminded them of the Passage, and because they had no navy—since they barely had an army—decided to leave camp immediately and drive farther inland. The prisoner will come with us, it was decided, and in the cover of night, in small bands more difficult to detect, they spread out across the fields descending from the mountains.

Years later, historians would document this moment as the revolution's undoing, when slave battalions scattered like a bag of winds and were caught by British sails, so to speak. More literally, they were shot to smithereens by the onshore navymen. But for the moment, they are still safe.

In the dark Caroline Margarita slips in place next to Amun the glossolalist in the tall grasses during the longest march to oblivion. He recognizes her plaintive breathing and is surprised to find her hand in his; their fingers clasp together.

I'm frightened, she says.

He has never heard her speak of fear, in fact of any part of her inner life. Her eyes are the same dark pool as the night.

We'll be home soon, he says instinctively, without thinking of the meaning of his words. But it is the right thing to say. Ahead, they see the lights of their barracks, but Rudolfo is there and the others are there, maybe one hundred of them. Rudolfo signals the first blast. There would be many fires in the unnameable country, and like all others, Quincy's attack on the Maroons made a lasting iridescence in the sky; you could trace the shots for miles, talking death's language whatever the colour, taking sounds right out of the throat.

In the darkness, Amunji finds himself screaming vowels, finds only vowels, his tongue does A-O-I in the air, A-O-I, he says again until he feels something. Maybe his arm is soaked. A-O-I, he yells without reply though she was holding his hand. Glossolalia is an unpredictable miracle, and while later, other members of my family would become overwhelmed by its unnameable, my great-grandfather would be the first to experience its limits. A-O-I, he screams in the midst of other screams and of others. He touches the pain and the red; indeed his arm.