Fire in the Unnameable Country (5 page)

A new breed of tsetse fly had been aroused by the persecution of the rebels in an infected region of the plains in the northwest of the unnameable country, and the soldiers had brought back with them a sleeping disease that spread with the promptness of a fairy-tale spell. For the strongest among the afflicted, life continued after drifting off into a sleep from which they could not awake: they were able to carry on conversations as somnambulists, to continue working; some children took their lessons at school, though much more slowly; adults contributed to only a slight increase in road accidents; but sooner or later everyone succumbed to a deeper slumber. Vegetable vendors in the markets slept unaware of thefts committed by mongrel curs, who had, during their slumber, developed a taste for zucchini and eggplant.

Recognize our flat has been transformed into somnolent castle chambers of the old tale: father fast asleep in his chair, newspaper in hand, despoiled teacup still in hand, raided by drosophilae; the grandmother with a finger frozen raised lecture high, in the midst of a story that goes on and on in dreams, facing her grandson, who stands before her with head bowed, eyes closed in respectful attention; and then the two sisters of mercy and goodwill, of course, sleeping beauties to coronate the scene, in their respective positions.

Outside, the world falls comatose, as if dictated by the laws of a hidden nervous system so we might forget the ravages of civil war. Recall from endless talk and reports of the illness since its occurrence that some people, however, were spared longer than others. Xasan Sierra, for instance, who ordinarily slept on a cot in his shop, remained awake long enough to smoke twelve cartons of cigarettes. He continued to smoke as he dreamed: he saw himself sitting in the rain outside his
shop, looking up at the endless downpour that didn't even moisten his cigarettes, and as he stared he wanted to call out to this other Xasan Sierra because his lungs were burning with the desire to smoke, but he could neither move nor speak, and he watched in anguish as the doppelgänger lit one stick of tobacco after the other until he heard the cocorocoroc of the roosters and it was time to wake up.

Xamid Sultan managed to avoid the illness for quite some time by staying awake with the help of coffee and meth, and during his time awake, noted everything and added it to the government's files. Sultan was a hypochondriac who had grown up in a home with a mother nurse who sprayed insecticide from morning to dusk and who begged her household please wash hands wash hands wash hands; Sultan had been certain his excessive cleanliness would save him from the fate of his countrymen. It was he who, among four others, cruised in a Jeep bursting his lungs through a megaphone declaring a state of national emergency, though no one was awake to listen, and he who sent a message to the adjacent countries, to the World Health Organization and to the United Nations before succumbing to the illness himself one exhausted red afternoon.

When word got out, and a thousand foreign doctors arrived wearing astronaut uniforms and travelled throughout the country trying unsuccessfully to administer treatment, they detected the barnyard odours of cow and goat flesh emanating from the mouths of the sleepers and concluded that some inner metamorphoses had occurred, and that those affected by the sickness were no longer human. Would-be looters and pirates thought they had found the prize of the century and fell asleep soon after they landed ashore or crossed our borders. The plague spread to the outer limits of the country, but remained exactly within its political boundaries so that the Bedouin who crossed into the unnameable country fell off their donkeys and camels and curled into sleep in the desert sands, but those who had managed through somnambular
wherewithal to plot a method of escape returned to a regular life of day and night.

For us, all seemed lost, and for some time the world sent condolences via unanswered letters and telexes, while there spread images of a sleeping country too dangerous to enter. So strange was our conundrum that it pushed us even further from the maps of the world, since no one believed a whole nation could fall into incurable sleep.

Then one day, after the foreign doctors came and went, neither curing nor burying, a gentle shower of fireflies descended as if it was time, like the clatter of rice on rooftops of concrete or corrugated tin. The roosters awoke first, then the hens and the mongrel curs, the camels and horses and donkeys, the rust faded from the exhaust pipes of cars and metal poles, and the walls stood up straighter. Finally, when the people began to reawaken at seven-thirty in the evening, they could not understand why the whole earth glowed green or how centuries had passed and the same ruination stood everywhere: gutted buildings, cracked mirror streets, everywhere the same stench of squalor and putrefaction. Some had dreamed all this to expiration and wanted to return to the paradisiacal blue mist through which they had hitherto been walking and which held no memories, only a soft music without source and which was listened to by all the organs; others had been capable of dreaming only what was their daily retinue, and awoke believing that if they were unable to imagine a better existence, no change was possible in so-called real life.

Sadly, we swept away the firefly corpses from the streets, but their phosphorescent odour stuck to everything: clothing, cars, our conversations, the sheets, to every grain of rice we ate; we pulled it out in glowing clumps of our hair. For a year afterward we breathed only that incurable sadness that no prayer could heal, and it was rumoured that no one made love anymore. All the plants in the region where the illness had originated were deracinated, the wells destroyed so no flies
could breed, and whole villages and towns left to the same fate as the Abd not so long ago.

At that time, for the first time, Hedayat wanted to speak, since while he dreamed he had gathered ideas that necessitated a more complex language than merely pointing. That was also when he and Niramish began visiting Narayan Khandakar's chocolate shop after school, and for free, because he was my father's adda friend, we were able to wander that neighbourhood foundation of childhood dreams unattended, and to consume at will.

Owner babu offered, take, Hedayat, anything you like, and Hedayat chose the most grown-up kind of candy he could see: rum candy. The candy tickled at first, iced his tongue, then shot metal nasal, clouds of invisible smoke, moved throat to lungs and came out in coughs. The first sounds Hedayat made were guttural, from a region deeper than his stomach, which were not the intestines had no name, from hidden organs.

What did you chew, son, Confectionarayan was confounded by the effects of an eating thing in his shop.

Hedayat's first words were babble in tongue in fluid indiscernible language that Confectionarayan knew was not the result of goo candy, which you chewed before placing in your parents' paths, which stuck their shoes to the asphalt, or the Amoon brand of gum, whose packages advertised in playful colours to shoot you out of the atmosphere, fly you to the moon if you blew a bubble larger than your head, or the capsicum candies called recallrecall®, a doublenegative brand of sweets so strong they made you forget you, and which sold best and was the latest bubblegum craze. Confectionarayan made me take water, ran to get milk when the symptoms continued.

Hedayat first did ow ow ow ow ow because his tongue had fallen asleep and he couldn't spit out the rum candy. Niramish and Confectionarayan were so worried they ignored any potential deeper
meanings of the event and interpreted the miracle only as a body in danger: the owner of the shop finally managed to reach into my throat and removed the obstacle, and Hedayat choked and spat out his first words, a whole comprehensible sentence, without angelic aid: Thank you.

As with my leap from the horizontal to the walking vertical, I shot from mum to full speech and fire so fast, dizzy among multiplied faces of Niramish and Narayan Babu in the shadows of candy boxes, shelves of bubblegum sugar buttons sour keys Turkish delights butter tarts lemon squares myriad sweet celebrations, I nearly missed my uncle's warning, words so many first words, babu, but watch out: most grown-ups aren't like me; if you talk too much they'll wash your mouth out with blood.

But it's difficult for him to follow such rules. Keep in mind: Hedayat is almost a glossolalist.

At first, I chirp incessantly, identify my surrounding environment methodically, overhead is a warbling swift,
Chaetura pelagica
, a common enough avian, liable to fly into a chimney now and again, turn a Roman arch three-hundred-sixty and you have over there, I point, a mosque oniondome, or churchtops of certain denominations, defining, explaining, raising such a clatter that Niramish, who at first is joyous to have acquired a speaking Hedayat for a friend, becomes exasperated. So I try and include him in conversation. What do the cameras film, I ask him as we walk nightingale streets where caged birds for sale shriek into microphones placed to hang from balconies overhead, as we unknowingly trace the gangster-steps of our forebears in tin pan alleys where cameras watch blind howling beggars considered some of the best unrecognized singers in the business, who separate gold from toilet water in plates and dishes and bowls along veins of open-air sewage canals. Movies, he points to posters of abundant Hollywood films. I look at the ominous omnipresence of cameras on top of traffic lights, street signs, newspaper boxes, at cameras peering car windows,
through trucks, huge honking cameras ported by beastly types, more cameras than there were yesterday, and I don't believe him. I think there's more to the story, I say, and as I begin to/ Would you shut up shut up already, please, you're making it worse, this headache is made worse by your endless. I am leaving, going gone bye-bye gone home now, screams the exasperated Niramish before leaving me in a labyrinth. Neither he nor his friend suspected that the tsetse fly disease, which had officially been eradicated, was responsible for Hedayat's unending talk methodizing the world.

The sound of my voice astounds me so much that I drive the family to earplugging at night, unable to quit even while sleeping, when, perhaps due to some lingering effects of the tsetse fly disease, I dream night after night of encyclopedic landscapes that feature your humble narrator roaming as boy prince, naked as Adam. Hedayat waves his hand with regal flair as he presides, heresiarch, over an animal kingdom of the mind inhabited by imaginary flora and fauna finned feathered petals. Mixed-up animals leap treebranches appearing as tusks. He turns his head one moment to the serpents shed lightning skin in the thick copse within which floats a stream. One million effervescent frogs swim through the ventricles of a beating heart floating disembodied, below the clear water.

I begin assigning names: You are a pumasticate, I call the feline mouth roar jungles into savannas during dream hours while searching bloody bite, the mouth known to devour children in their sleep, the pumasticate who travels with his friend behemadillo, a giant armoured reptile that shakes mountains with steps, who ferries the pumasticate on his hard outer shell as he sucks the air for insects like the murmuring elephantickles my right ear at night hot words Iagian whisper. Irrelephants, you shoo, I usually slap my ear and say: onward ho, go now, I tell them, toward life or some measure of it. Animalia, mammalia, chordata, dividing and subdividing hallucination until one
day, the kingdom turns unexpectedly into tsetse fly nightmare, into a vast antiseptic room where employees peer shortwave radios through headphones. I tiptoe through that strange scene of cubicles wide-eyes soft decibels, learning the crafts of assembly and collection, muttering excitedly when I realize, horrified, how first the thoughts are heard on wireless radio before they're stored on magnetic tape. I pace jittery across the linoleum floor, talking louder, explaining to myself how then the tapes are cut and assembled according to the specifications of the Department 6119 inspector handling the terror case until the scene disintegrates and I discover my father, astounded by my words, raising me horrified up into the air, dangling legs oaken arms holding me up. I see him through stillglued eyes, babbling sleep. See him lifting me into mid-air: child of clay and of clotted blood, he names me, born of woman, he indicts me of childhood silliness excess, faults the strength and burst of my language my play. He roars and thunders against my dangerous words. When he sets me down on the floor he hugs me so deep all the air leaves my lungs. Enough, he says, but the tsetse fly illness does something to me: from then on, I begin muttering goongooning nasal mmm and llliquids, my blood leaping mouth onto floor. I would froth from the mouth, I shit you not; these early glossolalia scenarios were truly frightening to me and for others around me. Desperate for a cure, my mother dragged me doctor to doctor, convinced the cause was microbial and could be quelled with the right antibiotic, but they disagreed with her after a handful of failed medicinal attempts, arguing they had difficulty diagnosing the illness, they had decided glossolalia couldn't exactly be termed an infection and therefore couldn't stop it so simply.

Glossolalia. What is glossolalia and what do they say of glossolalia. You may know it as panting keening raise-the-roof kind of God talk, but my automatic tongue was different. I didn't pray for glossolalia and I fasted because I was hungry, as disobedient children do when they can't
find what they want to eat. And though I'd like to eschew all presence of the characteristic diagnostic signals church fever flushed face and tears observable in the few Pentecostal establishments in our unnameable country, I must recall that my father found me one day flapping arms in T-shirt, arms with budding vanes barbs barbules, stirring the fetid air in my room with hairy forearms that looked like feathered wings, muttering the story of once upon a time a father imprisoned his son in a wardrobe.

Who are you talking to, I heard a voice behind me and turned my neck one hundred eighty degrees wide-eyed right around like an owl to find Mamun Ben Jaloun's astonished face staring at me. From then on, I tried to be quieter about my heedless iterations, but they emerged without warning like Niramish's narcoleptic sleep sessions. I would fly fantastical lines without consideration or worry for my surrounding listeners. I had become a glossolalist, an inexplicable condemnation, lifetime commitment.