Fire in the Unnameable Country (52 page)

Among the hundred ghosts grew clearer outlines after ingesting blood, I recognized the face of a man anxious fidget for a nic-fix, a face like mine but weathered older from life in the grave, who demanded onions, said he missed eating onions most in the grave, so we got him a bag and he chomped them like apples, streaming tears down his face, this Zachariah Ben Jaloun, my paternal grandfather, who had already been dead boulder in a coffin by the time I was born. I recognized him from my grandmother's pictures as the man who undressed minds with her in Department 6119 before they were wrenched apart by Black Organs. He motioned for a light and I passed him my butane flame. He peeled an onion, blinked words with his eyes, but I couldn't hear. How frustrating, I thought, to meet a ghost with a once upon a time that truly interested me/ what was the stone carapace that your dead body became, Dada, I wanted to ask/ but who I couldn't understand. I tried some rudimentary blinks whose meaning Masoud and I debated, asked him to tell us how he got here, but my grandfather spoke too quick and difficult with his eyes.

That's when I felt a tug on my shirt and the boy's gesture extending, offering me the conch with backward grooves whose regional meaning, according to Q who knew and loved the ocean, brought fortune to its beholder. I couldn't understand what he wanted until he put it up to his ear, absorbed by sounds I couldn't detect. I took it from him and heard Zachariah Ben Jaloun say the universe was shaking when the bullet entered my skull through the roof of my mouth, as I caught my grandfather describing his death.

So that's the meaning of the conch, I said aloud, as I listened with it pressed against my ear; how in that moonscape did the boy find such a thing. Zachariah Ben Jaloun smoked his cigarette. Why did you follow the boy, I asked. My grandfather ignored my question and instead blinked dust, lunar landscape after fire burned silk fields, after a blaze in village acres first covered with thick clotted spiderclouds. The living and most materially composed living dead sifted rubble for hours of rescue, he said, until even wispy ghosts barely bodies began rising dust to live another day, but they still didn't find the boy buried in the muck and fire.

Rather, Zachariah smoked as he said it, the kid found himself trapped in between fallen walls in open window room of his family home, where he was learning character plus character make a word. When walls fell flaming around him, neighbours rushed buckets of water, and after the blaze retreated showed its rubble, they could find no trace of the kid because in a moment of luck and wisdom, he had managed to find the cellar hatch. Hedayat bummed a cigarette as his grandfather continued.

The boy travelled hours through spidersilk stores and pantry chambers in the rabbit warrens that connected all the houses of his village, lost, but calm walk one hand in found jam jar and the other with conch at his ear. So he already had it with him. It was on his desk; it's how he heard us wispy ghost types standing in an underground potato storage room, rejoicing lamenting after blast after blast above ground, blinking furious can you believe we're alive after death. How does it work, I removed the shell from my ear and looked at it mollusc and groove, how do I hear your voice clear in my head while you blink.

Zachariah Ben Jaloun drew a deep breath of foul smoke and said it's a simple magic, really, found in uncommon shells in beaches of our region. Farmers usually find them in the same environment as minnow lizards that warn of spontaneous fires and keep them as household
showpieces. Mind you, backward shells are rare, Zachariah's ghost informed between bites as the air of the Hospice became sad from onion fumes, and children have always noted something unordinary about such conches, he continued; they use them in echo games because they say backward shells can amplify distant sounds. We think the boy used the conch in the past as a means of hearing a spider farmer acres away named Amir gunned down by paramilitaries belonging to the largest spidersilk retailer, that he used to listen to the old man wandering seized spiderfield heavy flat feet low moaning in graveyard and blinking thoughts of life after death, Zachariah peeled an onion. That's why the boy was able to recognize our blinking many rooms away underground as whispers, he concluded.

Who was the boy with the backward conch and what do they say of the boy. His region had been recent explosion and gravemounds, so we contacted an adoption agency through which Q filed to continue keeping custody and to induce the organization to try and find his living relatives. He stayed with us in the Halfway House after that. Cot or hammock, I offered; he chose both, hammock for the fly-swatting daytime and cot for night rest. Masoud and I tried to determine requisite meal amounts of blood for the ghosts while Q grew closer to the boy. What will you call him, I asked, and she said she would know when the authorities informed her, but time passed, the agency could find no record of such an individual, and reported it would continue searching for anyone who did. Q said she would invent his name when it came to her; for the moment, he would be her Boy.

That night, the three of us sat in the kitchen ate seasoned tuna can entrees with pita bread. We needed to write entries in our files and report to government agencies the nature of our most recent arrivals, but if the boy couldn't speak and the ghosts merely blinked. Masoud's transistor radio told us the Director's recent storm experiments had been aided by a gust of westerly winds and the movie's
design engineers' recommendation that the settings of the underwater rods near the coast of the Gulf of Eden be changed for the occasion. The intended result was fog, mist blown into La Maga everyone walk sheets of stratus. By the following afternoon, residents of the city made it home through stumble streets still knee high water and swimming marine life. They found day-old food items in full health of just prepared, fruit pits restored to flesh in their kitchens, calendars marked dates earlier than conflicts with friends, co-workers, colleagues. Time was moving toward greater disorder no longer, it seemed, because of the mist. Though the temporal effects of the fog were initially positive, and though it hadn't reached the Hospice, the transistor radio recommended higher ground to La Maga residents because of its uncertain nature. We heard voices in the streets grow louder. Let's go, Q prompted us when the boy began tugging at her sleeve, his conch held up to his right ear. We decided to leave the vaporizer breathing blood for the ghosts to continue eating in our absence, but they wanted to go with us, they followed.

Where, I asked Q. Maroon Peak, she announced, highest point in the city, she said, as we walked Hospice to alleyways, wended shortest route until reaching high mountain trail where the trees cast light shadows above the Director's fogscape, where you could see all of La Maga and beyond. Fog rose up on the road ahead of us, and I felt cold light move through my body take shape ahead with the others as the ghosts walked through us around us toward that ether. One of them paused near Q, knelt beside the boy. I saw Zachariah's ghost blinking talking to the boy backward conch up to ear. I saw him hand the kid an onion as a parting gift after hearing words. Then he walked into the mist with the other ghosts. After Q and the boy finished exchanging furious whispers, I asked her, what does he say. He wants to eat an onion like an apple, Q laughed.

RING
AROUND THE ROSIE

Ring Around the Rosie: why mention that Abol Tabol macabre rhyme behind whose trochaic sweet-step hides death and the plague. Why drag Albion Britannia, cobbled streets, and the fourteenth century to an epoch of the unnameable country's history marred by its own mass pathologies and black deaths. Handkerchiefs and crushed flowers. Hasha hasha. We all fall down. No: the rhyme is important, most of all because the Yea and Nay Quintuplets loved it so much. Portentous children with inclusion-exclusion principles as groove-worn as grown-up society; thumb-sucking children who cast faraway stares into the future or engage in blinking telegraphic communication with ghosts. Even such unusual children need to play.

Recall, as if you were there, soon after the arrival of the Boy with the Backward Conch, Q's breaths fell shorter when I held her, pensively, anxiously, as if she foresaw. I knew she was applying for jobs with Oxfam, Amnesty International, and the United Nations, and she asked me would I like to do the same. Wait, I told her, let me think, I said, and I thought, I considered every moment of the past my owl eyes could
see, from John Quincy's black sputum ship of infections and cattlewhips that was the actual story of the journey from the unnameable country, of its travels to the Caribbean port that secretly still admitted African slaves in the early twentieth century, to Quincy's discovery of the ability of shortwave radios to hear the human mind, his institution and development of Department 6119 its rows upon rows of thoughtspies that greatly contributed to the hundred-year transformation of our country into corridors and hallways.

Wait, I told her, let me think. I thought about Masoud Rana and how he was still drug dealing, about my owl's suspicions of Black Organs rounding every street corner behind me making every shadow in every alleyway, of being arrested. Does he need to keep doing this, I lamented to her. Does he need to come home night after night a sick and booger-dripping fee fi giant eat all our provisions, I thought, hungry after his desert drug dealing, about which we never ask but which makes a purse sound night after night spill coins onto kitchen table, I paced, gnashing teeth, and after which he falls into a sternutatory nap of sneeze afternoon to sneezing evening unto nighttime, sneezing and coughing and sleeping and sneezing that disturbed the Hospice's bubbling atmosphere of love so much I couldn't stand Masoud Rana's congested thoughtlessness that left Q and me to tackle all the everyday tasks of running the place, and I got up one morning to go to my parents' home for a few days for a break, and without even a goodbye to Q, tiptoed into the mirror streets, stepped into a strange house for shortcut purposes, and crossed two rooms with high wooden ceilings. The first contained a boy labouring to teach an older man to read, the man who was cringing and pulling out hair.

Stop, it's impossible; these are not the sesame words.

The second contained a porcelain tub in the middle, and a woman drenched in suds from top to toe, reaching up into the high notes of her bathing song.

Oh will you, she sang.

Pardon, I responded in key and in the baritone register, but I couldn't help but pause before moving on because the room, I realized, was surrounded by high rising panoramic stands, and a deeply immersed crowd was enjoying the woman's private aria, though it didn't seem as if she was aware or cared about their presence.

A requisite cameraman of
The Mirror
, still ongoing, who caught everything, moved closer to the centre of action, a grumble passed through the audience for my interruption, and still I couldn't move: in the corner a man was whipping and all the shadows were longer than his cat o' nine. A woman was bent over canine, naked from the waist down; a bag of spilled pears before her as she struggled to gather them, and she cried out for the ghost of my father, salt of my wounds, I know nothing.

The bathing woman was singing again and I cringed as she rose from the tub and extended a hand in my direction while running a sponge across the naked hulk of her behind. At the highest note of her register I looked for crevices in the air, and finding no place to hide I was happy to discover an opening in the opposite wall of the room. Though it was small, I managed to crawl through it, and there was a tumble then for Hedayat as he fell upward, because the wind was sucking him up through a ventilation shaft almost as powerful as the one in the hallway of the Ministry of Records and Sources, if you'll recall.

For a long time I travelled swiftly through metal tubing and heard only the whirring of fans as I was dragged through the air until flung somewhere in the midst of the Warren tunnels. When I recovered from my terrifying journey, I limped through the passageways instinctively. It had been so long, I almost missed their pungent ammonium odour, and every so often I would hear a whistle or a come on you from one porter to another, but I encountered no one in the flesh. At last, I pushed aside a wooden wall and found myself no more than one hundred steps from my home, but I was barred from going there. Between me and my
door, five thousand people stood crammed together, screaming as if they were all being bereaved of their organs.

A large machine was destroying everything, digging into the ground and gouging at the sky, and when the people came too close it would rush toward them, and when satisfied it had thwarted the people it would return to its task of digging and destroying walls and ceilings of the homes in our street. In this way, many people were deterred by a single machine.

Who were they, what did they want. Who are you. Why are they wounding the houses. I asked these things and members of the crowd only showed their placards on whose hard surfaces were written the meaning of their presence.

They are building the largest prison, said a young woman. Her forehead was beaded with perspiration. She exhaled like a workhorse and spoke the words absentmindedly as if I were a child and would never understand. She said more: they are in-between enemies, in-between sources, and boot-hopping across the continent, she tried again, measuring randoms with tongue dispensers and meat calipers from north Nilo-Saharan all the way to Khoisan south, trying to find the right things to eat.

I knew about the prison; however, the country was a prison, and although I felt indignant, I didn't correct her, and instead weaved my way slowly through the mass in hopes that what they all hadn't managed to do I would be able to accomplish through skill or by chance: to bypass the machine that was destroying everything. I needed to go home because it was too late to turn around and return to the Ghost Hospice. Besides,
Masoud Rana
was still there sneezing and cynicism and I wanted nothing to do with him while he was sleeping and sneezing and blowing all the dirt of his desert travels and befouling everything.