Fire in the Unnameable Country (56 page)

Recall that many years earlier, Gita worked in a government department where they peered into people's thoughts with shortwave radios, and more than once in her years she had wondered whether the experience of serving innocents up to butchers' knives desensitized her to the sanctity of human life; she wept with rage, thinking about putting on a fresh dress dark orange pair of sunglasses after her late husband's death, and starting her life again the very day he arrived at her doorstep heavy as a boulder, coffined. Hell, she gnashed teeth at her tote bag's busted zipper, and yelled for my mother.

My father never came home after my grandmother left, and Shukriah searched for him in every calling bell call and on the face of each customer that walked into her hosiery shop every day of the rest of her life.

At that time, the Quintuplets were sprouting quick adolescence without a father and sought shelter in Samir and Chaya's record shop. Under Aunt Shadow's gothful gaze they began touching black makeup to eyes lips, dangling metal piercings from creative incisions, and they began building pop music collections; Nehi gathered noise albums she blasted into headphones while her sisters went to the lottery. When Hum came home one day with a centimetre patch over a fleck of her
nose removed as dictated by her ticket, Nehi buried herself in news broadcasts of the most recent spontaneous fire in a spidersilk refining plant, which had been accused of refining spidersilk for antiballistic army wear.

Four years changed me too.

It happened without warning. I left Masoud at the Halfway House one evening and went to cigarette shop for a soft drink. I was dazed, had been feeling utterly bereaved since a recent trip to the airport whose events I couldn't recall but which left my stomach and chest full of shards of broken glass. It hurt to breathe, I wore a bandage around my midsection to curb the profuse bleeding, eating was an impossible task, I was constipated shat goat pellets diarrhea rush, fled from room to room of the Hospice and sought comfort among ghosts resigned to a deeper death, and it was Masoud who said to me go, bhai, get yourself some fresh air and a Fanta, and get me one too. A shadow fell across Masoud Rana's face when he spoke these words, and he shivered in the balmy equatorial June weather. What's up. Nothing, he said, and get me some rock candy, he added, as I shrugged off his strange demeanour before travelling streets and alleys, crossed quite a few intersections to reach Xasan Sierra's cigarette shop because I wanted to clear my head, needed the walk, and because I wanted to visit with his daughter Vera, to sit and have a Fanta at her store, see how she was getting along since the army shot up the street and killed her father among hundreds of others when the people protested fifty-six more years of American occupation.

I recognized the landmarks fall friendly shadows late afternoon, and knew the cigarette shop was near. That's when shimmer and heat peeled my eyes, lifted my skin cooked shrimp in a place where tapering streets required travellers to pass through them sideways, where the walls bled into one another, and that's where I felt the flutter of a bird insect or bat moving around my body, and when I slapped the sound I
brought blood to my right palm and crouched in pain as a car careened into view. A man opened the door held unrecognizable instrument to my skull before shouting loud words into my ears. The universe was shaking when they bundled me into the back seat muffled scream.

Hedayat awoke on a cold concrete floor in a room where walls pressed against his body from all sides. In dim light, he saw that his hands and feet were shackled. He rejoiced when all five walls began gliding soundlessly apart into invisible horizons, when the ceiling continued climbing, when the room's grey light let him plumb the increasing depths of its length width height, but when he tried to get up he realized either he had grown very large or they had really fucked up his brain with the fuzz pedal to his head, because he remained in place. If it was dusk when they brought him here, the artificial light, which seemed to emerge from the walls, which were opaque if you looked close, turned night black. Crawl centipedes flight of birds/ blade sounds of a string orchestra sustained one million rubble cries/ the breathing of a stranger whose breathing paused when his did, who didn't answer when he asked who are you. Time passed and to care for himself, Hedayat began once upon a time and halt, cried a voice. Hello, Hedayat tried to address the interruption, but met only silence. Once upon a time, he tried again/ at the bottom of a deep well, he continued despite the interruption, yet halt the voice cried halt in his grave. Again and again he tried to think of his present state of affairs halt and to thread past present future halt but halt was always the forceful response. Glossolalia, Hedayat cried, you have always been with me. Mutter and reason, I've trusted in you to part all the shadows, clear a path through the worst times. Was it there when you were with the underground animals, asked a big voice vibrated my skull, or when bigshot Hedayat announced the black economy also has its slavers and supplicants, the voice chided piquant, nasal, unsettled the boundary between outside skull and in my head. Where and who, I looked at
the tight walls. Fear, a glacial breath rose up from the soles of my feet how did he know these things about me. What amazes me, said the voice, is that you know we know and that we have always known. Hedayat said nothing. When his thoughts resumed, he remembered his sleight of tongue, that he knew the stories of others who knew. He had thought about them, mumbled their stories to himself of his grandparents knob-twiddling, listening headphones in Department 6119/ there's a movie about that, the walls shook as they said it. But Hedayat held his ground: my story, my owl's eyes on my head turned hundred and eighty/ loud laughter scraping glass: the film features a man with two tongues. Hedayat said nothing. Your grandfather, I presume. Fuck you. The voice subsided and for a moment, I felt victorious. I slept in patches of fake nightfall, peculiar daylight, pissed and shat in my pants. I tried to count the days with the revolutions of light and dark but I was convinced they were extending the intervals of each. Day and night occurred for increasingly longer periods, for so long I lost sense of dimension or direction, and the hot box they had put me in started expanding walls again. It continued growing until suddenly, I was sitting on its floor became a plane of sand, seemed suddenly like John Quincy's enormous room governed by an incandescent sun. How surprised I was when I could get up and stretch finally, when the walls expanded miraculously and the cage became a desert chamber. I heard nothing, didn't know why, what had happened to the voice or why the walls were running, and I ran at first to get as far away from the big voice as possible, and later, exhausted, I walked in the insufferable heat in the room's fetid breath electric sunlight, in the damn heat, for miles of dry throat. I finally stopped, removed and wrung my shirt under the high azure ceiling for a drink. Walking the thirsty sands gave me camel dreams. Caravans carrying sheikhs or sultans walked ant lines along the horizon under Oriental skies. I found no shelter except in hot rocks' shade. I walked for so long in such hot weather that the very name
Hedayat became a scattered remnant, grain of sand without memory or longing. Somewhere in the distance, I, if the term is correct, saw a grey rock in the sky and dust. I walked towards the colour and its shape broadened into a brick wall marked veins to mean years of weatherbeating, in front of which stood a lone faucet, metal vegetation rising out of the ground. Like a thief, I searched quickly in all directions, and finding no one, drank greedily from an unknown source. The pressure of the tap suddenly increased violently as I drank, gurgling, bubbling water in my mouth and down my throat, choking me, and when I tried to jerk my head away, I was held in place by the stream. Huge hands adjusted the nozzle while another, gloved pair of hands stretched my eyelids and directed instrumental light into my eyes. The oasis image of wall and faucet disappeared, the sky vanished, while the earth under me waited a second until my body realized it was horizontal, not vertical. Machine squeal a barren room slightly larger than the box I was interned in appeared in its place. I could feel a hard plastic rigour level with my spine, forcefeeding tubes in my mouth, as well as wires, instruments in the room beeping, detecting my vitals. I heard the voice that had hitherto emerged from the walls of my box cell say it's been a long time, son, it'll be over soon. He's going to a dual cell, confirmed the second voice. My last thought was of my mother's cheek on my cheek while she comforted me during the tsetse fly plague after I told her about the fever dream animals, when she said, your father calls it glossolalia but I think it's just kid's stuff, and you'll get over it as you grow older.

Time passed. When they brought me to the second room, I had been reduced to an item of description, mere diagram, stick figure on a stretcher that for weeks couldn't move without an intravenous. Slowly,
I regained the ability to turn my neck to sound and light, changes in temperature, movement, to the thin sand streaming conical pile on the floor, and to identify the possibility of other human life in the vicinity. I was probably introduced formally to Habib in the months I relearned how to walk and to remember, but I don't recall the exact occasion anymore. What I do remember about the cell an hourglass is how the sand fell soft through a precise bullet-hole in the ceiling. Every day, the sand would stream through the hole. The conical pile was always already chest high at its centre and spreading, growing higher. From where I sat, I could see that prepared for the inevitable, my fellow prisoner was standing in a corner, smoking, watching the soft drizzle, desert precipitation in the cell, which belonged to a cell block of the prison consigned to silence.

Since I would reside with him in the same room for four years, allow me to introduce Habib, whose three characteristics of note include his quietude, his tobacco addiction, and his curious dice game, which he played constantly, rolling it in his hand in response to the slightest sound in our cell block, closing his eyes, and muttering to himself and smoking as sand rose in our room.

I've never seen anyone smoke as much as Habib. He had formed trade relations with the guards, and bartered keenly for slather-grey tobacco and foolscap for rolling paper. He smoked in a corner of the cell, farthest distance from the sands, and buzzed smoke and melody through lips while standing stiff upright with arms folded as guards moved past us, as delirious men were forced to enter adjacent holding rooms, as every day the sands piled higher.

He taught me to sleep standing up like barnyard animals as slaughter prisoners shouted abattoir sounds around us despite the tight laws in this section of the prison against noise, as their minds testified against them from thoughtreels. The agoraphobic claustrophobic horrors of the first room gave way to other sufferings in the second,
though interrogations continued. They would haul me out of my cell by the scruff of my jumpsuit collar each day, several times a day when their reasons demanded, and, blindfolded, lead me down dark hallways in soft velvet shoes, as silent years passed by on either side of me, this one five, another one eight, ten years of imprisonment without trial or
habeas corpus
in one case. Four years for me. Four years of enter vast room shackled while loud disembodied voice demands answers to questions about times lives memories all suddenly suspects in fires in the unnameable country. The same brawny same bawdy interrogator appeared with his scalene pointy face, his humour of drink this, brother, thought I heard you wandered a desert in a coffin cell. This time, he came prepared with questions of whether I had participated in any meetings of the Islamic Justice Party, of what training Niramish had given me in the way of electronics, whether I had funnelled my drug money to any of a list of terror groups more populous than words in a dictionary, as well as with the constant query when had I last seen the Banquet Animals. Do you recognize these, he held up Niramish's uncle's bootlaces, the magic that had flown my friend and I out of an underground cavern. No, I lied. So be it, he said, and took out a lighter. Don't. Why ever not, he teased with a twinkle in his eye. Just don't. For a pair of laces, he taunted.

In the light of the halogen lamp shone bright, I remembered clearly how Q and I/ I said nothing. Our image together that night burned among lobster shadows, plumbing pipes, bloodstains, excretions. The interrogator swivelled the arm of the lamp away from me and I suddenly sat in the cold, in a dark expanse. My eyes adjusted. He was talking, I noticed, listening closely, murmuring secrets into a mirror that filled the entire back wall. An outside light entered the room. A corner door I noticed just then opened, and a man entered pushing a trolley containing a flat box and a television set.

Our country is filled with false stories, said the interrogator, of
people who imagine the things they see in
The Mirror
are real life. My heart fumbled a beat. The light on TV flickered blue before a moving image. My face appeared on-screen; not my face exactly but enough of me to call it a
Mirror
reflection. Then I saw her face and I fell down in my chair. Of all the methods, I thought, and the pained expression on my face signalled to my captor the method was working. He hummed quietly and with a remote drove the television to another scene, an action sequence. A boy and a girl held hands and laughing fun fun ran up a wall like ants or animé; they hit the rooftop running. I knew what would happen next, of course, and could have narrated the/