Fire in the Unnameable Country (38 page)

Dawn's roseblush finds fifteen rebels remaining and all captured. Amun, son of/ first in a succession of family members to be arrested. A-O-I, meanwhile, was restored to Caroline Margarita, wife of John Quincy.

When reunited after the infinite separation of a year or part of a year she seems different, her muscles more sculpted, her face and skin weather-beaten, her palms coarser, her voice more apt to rise into the imperative you must see do and so on. He, on the other hand, appears as if the iron of his bones has rusted in the meantime. He returns to her what he has been waiting to give, after removing from his pocket the wedding band she had sent in an envelope. She accepts out of pity for the prune
before her who had once gallantly ordered hundreds to drag a ship across the unnameable country to the Gulf of Eden.

Flashes of the recent past return where is Amun without warning.

Who.

The indenture who spoke strange words.

Many of them do, he embraces her deeply, so closely she can hear his ribs bending with the cric-croc pressure.

She finds herself unable to speak, discovers no air in there anywhere; then what a pang at whatever he would say next.

Dear, a commanding officer of the British Navy would like to speak with you for a few moments. Do you mind if I stay in the room.

Caroline's heart/ she regrets everything, her rash flight into the thick of war, what was she doing thinking, and now without a single friend, remarried to a tyrant, and queen of the Horn of Oblivion.

Her voice shows no sign of anxiety when she asks what can I do for you, Admiral Mulligan. But before the admiral has a chance to remove his hat, she is clapping her hands Moriah, she is saying, bring us a tray will you.

Please, Quincy rises, this is not a tea party.

No no, Mulligan retorts, I'm in the mood for tea. Please, let's sit and chat awhile, Mrs. Quincy. A porcelain cat strikes six, repeats six strikes, turns its tail round, leans down its black hat and replaces it headwise; its redpainted tongue laps from a saucer of milk. Onto a teak lacquered table there appear cakes and confectioneries, tea and Ethiopian coffee, chicken and raisins, rice, and Caroline realizes she is famished.

After the pirate emperor and the admiral had doused their throats the latter spoke. He spoke and he wrote it all down. So what did she then: she says this, if you must know, she does not say anything, she laughs
and laughs the way Amunji laughs at her when she is trying to deceive him, when he laughs at her until she actually does become the deserter as he asks, and sits before him denuded of her old woman's makeup, when she becomes the beginning of a revolutionary in an embryonic struggle against. (The numbers, by the way, are growing quickly against and the fire too, but you must hang on for those.) She laughs at John Quincy and Arthur Mulligan until they feel like two grains of sand in the desert of her imagination.

He tries again, explains to her that the war for the unnameable country/

You would prostitute your wife, she interrupts, for a neck of the woods that doesn't appear officially on any map of the world.

I would not; I am not asking you to do anything but continue what you yourself took the initiative to do.

To persuade him with my charms. Something of that nature. But to stop short of. What else. She thinks for three long moments. Where is he, she asks.

Somewhere.

Where.

Dungeoned, he waved off.

She didn't further; and instead: I have been corresponding with Anastasia, she said, referring to the fabled sole surviving immediate family of the deposed Romanovs.

And, he urged.

She had not, by the way. All her letters had been opened, carefully scrutinized, re-parcelled; it was known she had received no mail for the past six months. Nevertheless, she continued with the lie: she wanted to join Anastasia in Berlin, where she was hiding at the Weimar chancellor's daughter-in-law's apartment. What she wanted was safe passage.

So you're leaving me.

I'm not divorcing you, if that's what you mean, but I don't want to live anymore in this smouldering continent.

Do this for me, he pleaded, let us crush the rebellion and we'll go anywhere in the world you like.

But we'll have to come back because you haven't left and I have.

Please understand we have built a whole country together. And the heart, he concluded with more flair than he had managed in years, is an involuntary muscle; who knows why I, he stopped short. His wife appreciated his spontaneity; still, all was not well.

INSIDE
THE
GRAND
PIANO

The next day, Amun is brought shackled to an unadorned entrance of the Peacock Palace reserved for meagre guests or capture, driven underground metal gratings toward a prison cell covered in wet grey light. His hands hard worked lock and chain until the panther leapt beyond reproach or control of his guards. All the prisoners in the Peacock Palace cheer thief.

Amun weaves and wends through gaslit hallways as they chase him. They chase him as he flies flames through dark corridors, as he enters quick exits a spidersilk design room among the loom and toil of John Quincy's workshops prior to the first spidersilk factory. From thousand years' labour of woof and warp in hinterland villages of the unnameable country, of long dresses and arrow-resistant silk shirts, Quincy wanted to produce antiballistic wear for the British military.

That morning, he petted sad Caroline before leaving her a music box in her room and the unspecified promise of more. She rolled out of bed when he left. The recent churn of her heart lifted her restless wander through interior of Peacock Palace searching for an outside
face indoors. The atmosphere changed from humid to high mountain wisp as she passed door after door wondered what labyrinth functions within. Since it's easier to choose an open door over a closed one, Caroline peeked into, entered a room that was wall to wall spiderclouds and mottled webs. A man paced with notebook in hand, one side of the room to the another, jotting words in a journal about an old woman seated at a loom with skin of bark and back bent hands rooted to thread and motion. In a country late growing its colonial institutions, it wasn't an absurd question: Which department are you from, she asked the official stammering at sight of wife of the owner of all the dark corridors in the world. Caroline, curious, pushed past him toward the labouring woman doesn't lift eyes from her work. For whom, she asked Notebook in Hand of the old woman's make. Where does she eat her daily bread in this room and machine, she wondered, wondered bruised nails on the old woman's hands, Caroline's pang of emotion the result, no doubt, of recent audacious adventure-run into Maroon wilds. A scratch, the crone laughed a sandpaper rasp at her stare. Meanwhile, Notebook in Hand wrote it all down. Every day they come for the silk, he said simply. Caroline looked at the young man two moments and left the room.

In the hallway, sounds of the loom room give way to a collective hum that Caroline realizes when passing the next, all the next rooms, means silk manufacture behind closed doors. Why John Quincy never informed his wife of the spider husbandry going on constantly in the Peacock Palace is a forgotten question of her mind when corridor becomes crawlspace pressing against her sides squeezing, makes her move hands drag body toward the only light around, ahead of her through barely a hole in the wall.

She lies fetal on the floor for hard breaths, catches wind on carpet until realizing where she is: an enormous room populated by plastic shrubbery and rocks and a doum palm in a sandscape shaded high
ceiling. Two further accoutrements of note: a grand piano and a cry for help. What the hell.

Caroline Margarita walked toward the instrument's wooden sheen, its Cristofori design, unusual, though no more than recent crawlspaces and spiderweb workshops of her home. She reached the piano's clavier, its semicircle sweep above which rested a difficult page of music. She had taken piano lessons as a girl that allowed her slow interpret chords; she played spritz orange melodies rose citrus from the soundboard, as help. Caroline continued, stared at the inside-outside landscape around her as help, again the sound from inside the instrument, a garish cry.

She lifted the soundboard and saw instead of wires and felted hammers an impenetrable darkness, and heard the buzz of an ancient language. She brushed thick sounds aside and realized a man sat huddled in the corner, head in hands. For a moment, he cowered, but then Caroline said, Amun, it's only me. She recognized the Maroon and encouraged him to climb up the sides of the instrument.

When John Quincy entered the room with his dogs and his men, his enemy had already climbed out of the piano bunker and was embracing his wife in plain sight. What the hell.

Quincy had bought the grand piano from Spanish piano maker Roque Federico, who constructed it with a secret bunker, a beguiling interior deeper than exterior measurements showed to allow. Federico remarked in a letter correspondence with Quincy that the piano's architecture relied on a simple magic: the cubic interior was designed to make the viewer forget the trick of mirrors and, instead, climb inside for a sit. What better invention, Federico concluded, for World Wartime.

Quincy's first shot was a warning and the next whizzed above the pair's heads with pensive anxiety. The following bullets flew closer but seemed to turn in mid-air to avoid both Caroline and Amun. Who killed her is uncertain, whether the slaver or his men, but it's well known John Quincy mourned his wife's loss with greater care than he bestowed
upon the living Caroline. He had them remove her brain with pincers through her nose, sew her up before bathing her for weeks in the strongest preservatives to turn her dead and simultaneously alive: he made them embalm her.

FLY
YOU
TO
THE
MOON

Quincy, with all his guns and gall, blamed Amun for Caroline's death, but knew that to do away with him minor explosion wouldn't suffice because the slaves were still loose. Rather, his demise needed to occur between seeming equals, regalia and fanfare, astronomic theatre. At exactly 5:32
A
.
M
. the next morning, after a swift court martial under nascent military laws of the unnameable country, they brought the Maroon Amun before a dirigible, fat with helium and growling from the motor, that lorded over the crowd of slaves like a ferocious animal. Its rough canvas hide was once a violent purple but time and neglect had eroded it to a matte complexion. A thick cloud of steam effused from the balloon constructed specifically to house the sole pilot of this absurd mission to discover whether the political lines on the maps made by the landowners are inscribed within the physiognomy of the city.

Question: what was the taste of frozen on his palate like when he discovered, somewhere in the stratosphere, the true nature of his ascent. Another: did the map of the region truly resemble the political crisscross Quincy had shown him before sending him. Did Amun have a
chance to look down. Curioser and curioser: which patchwork blanket of memories covered him in those final moments. Were any of them memories of the future, of spontaneous fires in spidersilk fields where blossom and grey-clotted fruit, scuttling arachnids, all homes buildings humans in the vicinity burst unexpected flames. Even of Hedayat.

Note that when Quincy brought Amun clinking chains to the site of the dirigible, the laws of nature hadn't yet settled into regular course in the unnameable country and were still competing with one another for prominence. Water flowed downhill in some places, uphill in others because the unnameable country was young, a yearling or younger, and hadn't yet been tamed: a child might throw a ball afloat for hours, maybe days, before it downed back into his hand. As for map appearances, explorers and geographers noted it was shaped like a foot stepping on the body's torso, with left hand rising north to squeeze throat, right hand moving south to clutch gonads, its wholeshape a hallucinated painting.

True to its name and as is clear to see, our country possesses an unfathomable geography. Unfathomable geography be damned, the unnameable country must be real because they're working invincible roundtheclock to invent it, depriving limbs lips ears, horsewhipping furiously for dream of curving and straight streets, edifices, architecture, yes, but also geography, whole rivers dammed and forded, pits dug, perished workers thrown into: let them cry out in joy, Quincy would yell, let them realize their place is here and nowhere else, planting spiders, cultivating webs, harvesting thread for wear or garrison.