Fire in the Unnameable Country (50 page)

There were other forms of pain then as an artificial famine struck the drugs-and-guns savanna we traversed, not a mere bust but a suppliers' strike, by the sounds of it, but there had been rough times before, Q reminded, and we haven't ever thought of closing down shop; the Halfway House won't go under for a few short dollars.

There was, of course, another way: traffic in blood, they will pay. And it was true, as we discovered: the multi-tier healthcare system was full of gaps, smaller clinics that served the unemployed and working poor, sometimes lacking licences or the basic units of medicine, empty shelves ranging from antibiotics to antileprotics stood sometimes on the same street as the well-stocked, well-staffed variety. No blood. Not enough donors, to say it simply. To explain further: we stole from the richer hospitals, who sucked out of whoknowswhere. We were the middlemen.

Our collective conscience was governed jealously by Q, who was already red in the face about our drug dealing still and why so, willyoutell, while also standing entirely against the idea of selling blood until we convinced her, in fact, we were helping two categories of individuals, ghosts and near-ghosts, that our markup was not so high, that all we were doing was moving blood from those who had more than enough to those who had less than enough.

She still didn't, but eventually she did. Just as soon, the most profound: Masoud Rana, the lager-wielding gallant, splish-sploshing it in belly on shirt and on face, emerged from a pub already in the midst of a story we have missed by following other threads, thumbing his gat in his pocket. He clicked it back, smooth, black metalheaving in his hand, pulled it out just as the copper turned backward and away from the oldtimers he had been speaking to, and found only a hole of blood where once his mouth had been.

BLACK
ORGANS

Who are Black Organs. And what do they say about Black Organs. The Black Organs came to pluck out our eyes, to blinddeafendisappear us. Your mailman turns out to be an Organ, or the toll booth collector true story says sir step out of the car please for one second and dig your own grave before you're buried. Stay on your toes, say Black Organs. We are winning but the enemy is everywhere and indefeasible.

True story: Libby Solkovitch, widow, aged fifty-seven, was approached one Sunday in '57 around the time of the Governor's reign when the unnameable country was sinking into the soft marl of totalitarianism, by a woman who looked like the grown-up rendition of her long-lost and longpresumedasdead daughter. She looked up into those watery pale blue eyes and concluded yes, the right age and shape, howled out of a long-abandoned hope, the idea that such a moment would arrive so deep in the redemptive future, out of a pain that had lingered inside her as some causeless shapeless ache.

Come, Ma, the young woman took her by the hand.

And that was how Libby Solkovitch disappeared for fifteen years.

Another now, this one about Kamal Bari, forty, father of a small boy, husband and machinist at a Toyota plant in the interior of the unnameable country: for months, Kamal complained about strangers who seemed to know too much about him, who laughed at the private moments of his life, howcouldtheyknow, echoed his suspicions of his wife's infidelity, and that they augured misfortune and illness. He felt strange tingles in his body, his mind was awash in confusion, he was sure his food was being poisoned, that his wife was one participant of a larger conspiracy to kill him so she could resume life with her secret lover. He found her weeping in another room and took her tears to mean guilt. Enraged and impotent, he could find no solution between suicide and flight. Kamal Bari withdrew his savings and made the necessary preparations.

At the airport, he was told his name matched another's and that he was to follow those gentlemen over there.

Dark teeming sweat, ten million maggots per second, hyperventilation, perspiration, inside his body hidden organs were making work, moving fluids from one part to another. They offered him water, and Kamal Bari accepted and drank without thinking. In the chair he sat in his private solitude. The torture within was something else, and his heart stopped beating for no prior medical reasons by the time they came to tell him it was all a misunderstanding, the other Kamal Bari also possessed Hussein as his middle name. Shall I go on interrogation point

In 1983, at the beginning of the Madam's regime, the Black Organs network expanded until there were two or three hidden cells under every subway station where the institutions of shiver your entrails and brick shitting could be rendered. Some people are eyeshut about it while others will go as far in the opposite direction as to write that the birth of crack cocaine abuse in the Palisades was fathered by Black Organs, but truthbetold, we all grew up thinking
they could be anyone, your mustachioed uncle, your schoolteacher, your younger, bedwetting brother, your mother, the part-time mule, or your best friend, whose father one day screamed as they cut a hole through his ceiling and repelled from above costumed appropriately in dark, barking in an incomprehensible and eating the family's evening meal straight from the pot, rifling through the children's homework, inspecting the mother's eveningwear, before producing out of father's shirt, like sleight-of-hand tricksters, the apparent reason for it all: several bags of pure heroin.

Nowadays, since the incident in New York, it's the praying man, the mullah-man, Allahhissing serpent, oh spell it Islamic terrorist, who is the prime target of the Black Organs, is now potentially anyone. (They arrest Hedayat.) What are Black Organs. Why Black Organs. Black Organs, convince the private individual he wants public power over private lives: power over other human beings, power to see, to torture, to shame, to annihilate, power to tear a mind to repair however he likes. Give him that power in a soap ad, a car commercial, power with a certain number of snaps of one's fingers, with a lottery language a Re-Alphabet that does not exist: public power to accuse without saying a thing. (They arrest Hedayat.) Organs, who are not Black Organs. To the unbelievers, I ask: what did we hate before maybe communists. And did we hate as much and as well.

I mutter these things as I think. I call Q's name and find her, thankfully, sleeping peaceful next to me all is well. I drift off, still muttering under my breath. Until tomorrow morning, I grumble to myself, offered up to thoughtspies of Department 6119, are the following categories of Hedayat's thoughts: thoughts of twist and turning sheets in my bed, of a red blister from bum shoes need replacing, of rumble stomach and rumination of milk, of mealy wheat germ in the morning, offered up to their goddamn listening devices are thoughts of how do I fit this vegetable patch into the back seat of the Datsun today, thoughts of what
is the shortest route through La Maga's mirror-labyrinths, of planning the fewest encounters with soldiers and checkpoints and guns and humiliation; surely they will hear my recollections, projections, I think, before remembering recent news reports, talk of Victoria's biggest mob bosses supposedly supplying arms to terrorists of undefined denomination, and oh yeah, I wanted to see that recent Nick Cage invasion film they're shooting with live ammunition. Who will listen. Why do they want all my mutter all the time. Fuck this unnameable country. I turn over, kiss Q's bare shoulder. I listen to her breezes for a minute or a peaceful hour.

The next day, Masoud Rana came home agitated pacing, what, bhai, I tried to tease it out of him, tell me, I pleaded, and still he said nothing. We sat on the couch for a long time until he rose up suddenly and with a great guffaw declared he had killed a man. Shit, brother, serious. Yeah, man, he said. Then he said it again, bam! pointed bam! a gat insisted he killed him blood funtoosh, could you do it, sucka. Since taking up residence at the Ghost Hospice I realized how different my friend and I had become, where our sights now lay. My owl eyes had begun, with Q's love, to understand my life and memories as longer than set to movie set of
The Mirror
staging gangster flick or domestic drama or science fiction scaffolds and wiring for the next edition of the longest film in the world, enclosing our country in a complex order of walls and floors and ladders and make-belief, turning it into dry ice dioxide, indiscernible movie mist.

When Masoud Rana deadpistolled Morris the cop, he did so in the throes of a passion that could only have been sustained by a member of our fatalistic youth that live between movie-set checkpoints governed by the same security forces that demand identification to travel between the rooms of your house if you're unlucky enough to experience such high-level surveillance: he knew his life was over long before he fired the shot, but since his heart continued to beat, why should it not do so
forever. Despite the fog of youth, which hides death is always future death, he understood they would come for him, and that they would torture him and probably kill him, so why, then.

When Masoud Rana began to black vomit soon after the death of Morris the cop, Q presumed he was suffering an attack of listeriosis, a recent endemic in our country, and couldn't understand why he refused to seek medical treatment. Over the following weeks, he lost twenty pounds, and we were frightened it would infect us as well. But all we caught were mild headaches and a feverish sense of foreboding. We recovered soon enough and went about our business of thieving and selling blood, not knowing our friend had endangered the whole enterprise of the Halfway House and the task of survival.

The cardinal rule of the hustler: commit no unnecessary violence. That was, as Masoud Rana and I had always agreed, the way to move smoothly through the arteries of the other economy; why occlude the whole body and give everyone an aneurysm. No need for the gangster-front unnecessary and foolishness, we would say to each other in the Datsun, laughing while driving from one shitty deal to another.

All the signs said the unnameable country insisted on tasting with your tongue, smelling the odours your lungs took in, crushing your life world, and my father's shoulderspy was one example of such Black Organ agenda. Not too long after Masoud said he performed his gun act, Q and I visited my family home. She had heard the stories of the shoulder-sitter who for the longest time in our family had been a joke, who hunched my father back-broken with years of the same misery of walk with brush with eat walk snooze and shit with that burden on your back.

Years earlier, when my father contacted the Ministry of Records and Sources, it told him there was no Mamun Ben Jaloun in the system
before realizing it hadn't killed him yet. My father got a rise and shine phone call several mornings later. A purring female voice informed him that indeed a man-sized parasite had been scheduled to sit on his shoulders and that he was responsible for its upkeep. When asked why and what legal recourses he had to rejoin his life of relative comfort, Department 6119 resumed its primary position that until it could verify whether such stringent surveillance had in fact been implemented, it couldn't comment further.

Let's pry the sucker's mouth, Q dangled a packet of rum candy, sly smiling. Trust me, she insisted when I said I didn't understand.

Q and I entered my parents' home sweetmeats box and rum candies in hand, sweets for the fam and cane liquor concentrate for the surveillant. My parents got the game and my mother even played coy. Your stomach will churn for such gross trespass on God's law against alcohol, she warned, while my father, hearing each candy contained a single shot of rum, and wistful of his father's youthful flirtations with modernist poetry and attractions to late-nineteenth-century European bourgeois lifestyles, asked if he could have a taste.

My mother spun a dance single on vinyl that Aunt Shadow and Samir brought the last time they visited, on which occasion Chaya informed my mother she had aborted her pregnancy and she and Samir were debating the idea of expanding their record shop to include a practice space for bands. Amidst the sweetmeats, upbeat pop number, and alcohol candy, Hedayat and Q felt ready to join the fun.

The shoulder guard preferred the single the second time he heard it, and Hedayat pushed the next record in a series of songs that saw our house's dark windowpanes brighten with spirits rushing arteries without a drink in sight. His resistance lowered and for the first time in years, my father rolled, relaxed his shoulders. Rhythm pushed melody to crescendo, as Q bobbed sexy under dinnerlight, at the exact moment of the shoulderspy's drunk and tumble deep afterhours. He gave a fearful
scream and Mamun Ben Jaloun ran as far from the fallen assailant as possible to the other side of the room while son defended father punches to the shoulder-sitter's head.

Since there are no explicit laws in the unnameable country governing the instatement of shoulder-sentinels, their deposition, naturally, meets a similar judicial lacuna. The warders guarding the doors of our apartment understood their limited roles against the house's inhabitants and watched as Hedayat fought argument retort counter-argument glossolalist for hours until the bow-legged scum was forced to leave our home. Q and I kissed a job well done as my father cried in relief and my mother thanked us with homemade jilapi.