Fire in the Unnameable Country (48 page)

Who were the Vulgarists. And what will they say about the Vulgarists once upon a time. How will posterity frame their projects vast tarpaulin sheets over richest neighbourhoods of Victoria Benediction La Maga with the words CARSANDHOUSES painted CARSANDHOUSES, CARSANDHOUSES repeated on top of actual cars and houses. The Vulgarists screamed when they wrote, painted, sculpted, made collage.

INSPIRED BY THE NAMELESS REBELS, THE VULGARISTS MADE A NAME THIEVING MOVING MIRRORS THROUGH THE WARREN TUNNELS AND USING THEM SMASHED IN ARTISTIC PORTRAYALS OF THIS REGIME'S GROTESQUERY: BILLBOARDS REPLACED WITH SMASHED MIRROR BLOODY TAIN AND BACK AND NEWS OF THE LOTTERY'S RECENT BETS, CHALK ON CAR ON HOUSE ON GRAVEL WITH THE COVERED OBJECTS' NAMES WRITTEN LAYERS OF PAINT MAGAZINE NEWSPAPER MIRROR: COLLAGE AND KALEIDOSCOPIC REFRACTIONS OF LIFE IN THE UNNAMEABLE COUNTRY. THE OCCUPYING ARMY BEGAN TARGETING AND FOLLOWING THE VULGARISTS. THOSE THAT GOT AWAY BEGAN PROPPING MIRRORS ON WOODEN CONSTRUCTIONS, CRACKED SHATTERED MIRROR-MIRRORS REFLECTING THE MIRROR-WALLS THAT
THE MIRROR
STARTED BUILDING LONG AGO AND WHICH, OVER THE YEARS, ENTIRELY COVERED THE STATE. THE VULGARISTS BUSTED BLOCKADE MIRRORS TO SHOW MIRRORS PREVENTED EASE OF TRAVEL AND MULTIPLIED NEEDLESS SUFFERING, REDESIGNED, RENAMED, REORDERED HOLLYWOOD SHIT MIRRORS, BUSTED MOVIE MIRRORS TO SHOW HOUSES BONES TEETH AND HAIR AND HOUSES AND A CAR IN EVERY DRIVEWAY, LAUGHED THE VULGARISTS BLACK SPUTUM.

During the day, the Vulgarists lived at El Doubly Tea. It became their home away from the La Maga Academy of the Arts, and Hamida and Abdullah were not only glad to donate the walls floors ceilings falling paint and chalk to their whims, but even to set up hammocks to accommodate their odd sleeping schedules.

Once, while they were spreading manure over a large bust of the Governor, Hedayat asked what they thought of contemporary art, and the room froze for one moment before issuing a sound like a ruptured gasline. Laughter out of little corners until let him, hush, Bete smiled and tried to thread his language through the still-hissing crowd.

In a single word: propaganda, he began. Every little. He stumbled. He smiled. He asked: Do you notice every film, H, or teleflicking advertising firm, and when every schoolboy doodle is the same hatred and identical. Ask this, H: Whence the spontaneity or ownmind ownlife.

Arachnae cleared her throat: Shit of rien de shit the shit to clog, she spat crystalline on the ceiling hung stalactite, and a little light shone from her mouth: to occlude all paths leading to any conclusion but the one: is this not the objective of propaganda.

Which one, Hedayat asked.

Total, the room tsk-tsked.

Surface-level topsoil totalshit, another laughed.

Farms and landfills, someone added.

Deep also, said the brushes and the foam churned inside Hedayat and his feathers rose up.

He shivered. And yet what are you: he pointed to the manure-laden bust: Is this not also propaganda in its own right.

The room laughed; there were hisses.

Bete merely shrugged; we are twenty-five of us Vulgarists on a bright day; twenty-five people cannot make propaganda. By definition, it is everyone eating ownflesh; by definition, it takes an entire perpetual beehive.

Despite his lack of a craft, Hedayat found a vocation at El Doubly Tea when he was not assisting Q at the Hospice, and he would carry paints and the utensils of the day's exercises and watch as they worked, while Bete knotted his ball of yarn into nodes for future reflection. Here were others in whose company it was possible to understand that the daily world shook deep vibration into bones, and that its smells were poison and that every apple in every marketplace was a lottery ticket to oblivion, systematically itemized, poisoned accordingly.

The margins in the unnameable country had become absolute: either in or out, tarrying to decide or to think had become dangerous,
impossible, and contemplation criminal. Here were others who not only understood but who heaped onto the canvas and sculpted into shapes and pointed fingers.

Let it be known Q also preferred the company of the Vulgarists, but not the way Hedayat did. You and I, she would say, and others like those of the Vulgarists, and others like those of the original Eve, she would sniff a little pepper in the nighttime when we would still frequent, but not them, she would conclude: I have never observed a total transformation.

And this was true. It was something odd about the arthouse crowd, as if they understood but could not exactly perform the animal or machine. They coughed and they sneezed and blew an awful lot of pepper, they made motions toward either and yet one always knew these were incomplete trials, as if they were truly too human to change.

Not me, Q would say, I'm a mosquito, and I'll always be.

I loved her then, and truly it was good then. Between her and the ghosts and the Vulgarists on the other side, I was either with her or with them, my nights and days filled with laughter and contemplation, contented, in a word, until.

One day, while in between either place and shortcutting through the Warren tunnels, I found myself pressed up against a rockface, which gave like an oomph before my feet dangling and mouth cried uncle; but not actual uncle and a return, actually, of those Herculean words: child of clay and of clotted blood, born of woman, do you know me. I did not recognize the voice that was no longer spilling stones, which I had not heard once in the past two or three, during which I could have cared less because I was happy in the world, but he held me above the subterranean soil for so long I finally knew and cried out, mercy, Masoud, I have not forgotten. Then the rockface released me and exhaled. The tunnels' string of incandescent bulbs gave me his form and I saw it was indeed Masoud Rana, and I was happy because I remembered
his illumined speech near the jetty on the morning I thought he was a friend.

Tell me, friend, he jingled his pockets, what are you worth these days. I thought of my once robust savings, which had dribbled through the holes in my pants like so many little pebbles and more of which I had scattered because I was certain there were many more where the ocean met the Gulf of Eden.

Come with me, he dragged me by the scruff of the neck, while dragging behind him our cart of daily wares.

That was how Hedayat returned to the courier's grind, and he did not like it then. Though slowly it replenished his depleted stock, he had little time for carousing with artists, and when he found himself back at the Hospice, the television gave out its stock colours and sounds, there were too many diaphanous shapes shuffling about like forgotten memories, it was difficult to remember who preferred rose oil with her blood or who liked yogurt and chopped parsley afterward because he didn't like the taste of blood at all, who were hunger striking and dancing skeletal with death beyond death, would anyone like to play dominoes, and all the tasks toward which he forwarded steps, though Q never asked. Nevertheless, a yellow ribbon of light would trail behind her when she was content, her gratitude and generosity were boundless, and her breath was an effusion that enriched the whole Hospice. For a long while, the mere company of each other was sufficient to mule the burden of work that drew deeply on their resolve and resilience.

Time passed. Since the lease renewal of the American air force base, the splintered religious groups gathered under the umbrella of the Islamic Justice Party, which was the largest political organization of its kind and situated in the Warren. Their divided understandings of the American
military presence, exegeses of the lottery economy, the role of women in society, conflicting definitions of nationalism, of Islam, opinions on the Madam's regime, of
The Mirror
, whether reason and the soul were the same or separated, whether the ghosts of the mirrors were soulless vaporous images or the continuation of human beings, if there were such a thing as the ummah or the term was misleading, if it was forgivable to exchange the divinely ordained activities of the right and left hands, all seemed less relevant in light of a choking repression like none other in the unnameable country's history, and nowhere worse than in the Warren.

For a long time, the water there had become as saline as the Gulf of Eden; the turbid fluid that emerged from the taps came and went without warning. Darkness declared monopoly and engulfed the residents whenever it pleased as the electricity, gasoline, and natural gas were even more fickle than the water supply. Many people tried to leave, and often they were crushed in the tunnels, like families of rabbits by armoured bulldozers doing their grave work above ground. (Meanwhile, the courier's life grew riskier.) All the grains of sand seemed also to be trying to flee its cordoned premises, leaving the earth there smooth like a sun-polished whalebone.

Everywhere there floated the stench of rotted memories, and the future became mixed up with the present; out of nothing there bloomed the story of a little boy who kicked his soccer ball across the mirror-walls and found it several alleyways later, extending from the arms of a man with two weeping glass eyes who claimed to be his grandson. Volunteers from the United Front (as the umbrella organization became known) travelled from home to home carrying siphoned gasoline, firewood, baskets of bread fruits vegetables, schoolbooks and confectioneries for children, freshly built furniture, offers of zero-interest loans, with fingers pressed to tight lips, say nothing, you hear nothing, know nothing until the time.

When a world of young people from the Warren began trickling into El Doubly Tea, I had the premonition things were about to change in the unnameable country. At that time, the nightly carnivals had grown bolder and the carousing more urgent, as if there was no time to lose because the future could fail to arrive at any moment. The Vulgarists, who had never mastered the art of blowing a little pepper, sought to cover up their failure by accessorizing according to others' metamorphoses: beaks and canes became fashionable, ostentatious feathered boas and large plastic turtlebacks, even fur, despite the region's tremendous and perpetual hostile heat, not to mention letting off the scent of carrion: all these were preferable styles.

We knew the four newcomers were different because they stood out in those peacock proceedings as if covered by a dark lugubrious umbrella; their clothes did not befit an establishment that was becoming increasingly tailored to the likes of the young student crowd; they looked sad, though not pitiable poor, and their eyes were consuming everything, asking questions and acknowledging the responses their minds formulated in the next moment, and they didn't speak a word. They seemed to know why they had come and took their seats along the third row of the metal tables, where they began pouring onto the crook of their thumbs and forefingers without first having a drink of sangria, which was customary to do.

I didn't stop looking at them for an instant and was staring so much that Q took my elbow and quizzed me silently what's new with you. I couldn't say until they were well peppered and starting sneezing and blowing like a brass band about to start. Let me remind that among the four there was a tall and thick, a short and mangy, a box man, whose shoulders were wide, and an innocuous older woman, who played the cautious notes and who seemed familiar.

Who is she, Q floated into my thoughts.

Then they began: the four newcomers, after having inhaled their first
tinctures of black pepper, began—listen to this—hear that blue buzzing from lips as if they are the striking midnight on twelve thousand trumpets: is that not the sound of Gabriel at beginning or unyielding clamour. Then whole bodies shaking and moving to the ground, recall as if you were there, a summit of dancers, limbs and heads piled high and thrown joyously and the idiosyncratic jukebox was going then, but it didn't matter because all the sound was everybody's. Every throat in El Doubly Tea was adding a noise, shaking tremulous into that transformation.

We followed them outside as they continued to blast their mouth instruments, the pied and so many singing rats and dogs behind them, panthers, standoffish prickly hedgehogs, bird-beaked humans wearing canes and with painted faces, spinning computer hardware, floating eyeballs, dragging the lyrical odours of garlic, black pepper, onions, raisins, and freshly baked bread, and recall from the footage the cameras were there, and that
The Mirror
continued to follow in vans and trucks what was for its crew no doubt a loud and impersonal clamour, and in the midst of that multitude I could hear Q's mosquito-buzz, because every so often I would press my ear close to her so I could add thirds or fifths to her song.

They found us, of course. The sirens scattered the crowd and the fear of truncheons, but when we broke apart, Q and I were not so far from the four and away enough from the coppers. We whistled at them and they waved back and smiled.

Fine performance, Hedayat extended, we don't ordinarily experience bands at El Doubly Tea.

We're not a band, said Tall and Thick.

But you were an oboe, if I remember, Q said.

We introduced, met hands, and that was when it became possible to know and not to have to weep with all mybody body later when I realized the truth about the unnameable country; the pieces may have fallen into place much sooner, is what I mean.