Fire in the Unnameable Country (58 page)

Hedayat gazed around him at
The Mirror
in a home, recalled his father's shoulder imprisonment, the guards that demanded identification before allowing the family to move from one room in their home to another, and thought how homogenous time and space had become in the unnameable country: everywhere was indoors with sentinels sat our shoulders. I thought of a glimmer of difference in all the sameness, thought of Q, who told me the past is a haunted house, Hedayat, when I awoke beside her one morning from a terrifying nightmare: I saw you leave forever, I said, and she sighed, smiled while holding my hand to her cheek before informing me of her exit kit, her job, a plan to flee the unnameable country.

Four years later, I awoke from my recollection when a mirror on my right bent light and image into my left eye, and a mirror on my left shot a picture into my right eye. Fog and shimmer of a 3-D stereogram image made the face of none other than the man I had accused in my prison years of handing me to the cops after careful induction from every word
and silence in the time we knew each other. So fragile my belief in his very existence, he flickered as all the mirrorlight teasing question object or image. But he was no less wiry with the years, and quick to pull me into jovial tones, disappearing puffffff of smoke returning lickety-split with laddoos and sweet swears, all bhai-bhai and shit as if we were in the days of the '66 Datsun.

I'm looking for a boardinghouse, Masoud, I said, and he, arms outstretched, said welcome home. Must be a mistake, I wondered Habib's prophecy and intention. Stay, please, Masoud seemed serious at my frowning volteface, called a name loudly into mirror-mirrors. You're here for the room, he bade me follow when she didn't appear. Turn after turn through the passageways, Hedayat saw himself growing shrinking in size, fat or string-bean skinny depending on the reflection suddenly little Hedayat's candy face in Confectionarayan's shop with a school friend, gorging on chocolate. The image of Narayan Khandakar's tin-metal receptacle appeared in my mind's eye suddenly because all the reflections around me stirred the most beguiling memories of the distant past, and I was tempted to ask Masoud if he had thought of its meaning in all the years, before remembering the event belonged to the story of Niramish.

You'll love it here, Masoud Rana pointed at the ceiling: the room is upstairs, he said, before inquiring how I earned a living. I'm clean now, he told me when I didn't respond, quit the pepper dealing soon after you started your prison stint. What do you do now, I asked. I run the place, man, he told me of recent changes to the Ghost Hospice, of the increased number of ghosts walked through doors due to proliferation of spontaneous fires in spidersilk fields, even hired our first undead staff recently.

Masoud, I shifted my tone, embarrassed to ask the man I was sure betrayed me for help. I'm clinking remains, man, what they gave me when I left jail, I said.

You want a job.

Yes, man.

We've been short-handed for a while, I'll cut you a deal on rent. I'll come by after you've settled in to talk to you ropes and literature about Ghost Hospices; I should also

What.

Hosanna, he exclaimed, and paused at a mirror without reflection unlike all the others, knocked against its surface, strange, he said. Wait here, he motioned with a hand, and pushed the glass, before disappearing behind it.

For a long time, no one appeared, and I was unable to persuade Masoud's mirror-door to open sesame. I tried to retrace the paths we walked by remembering their reflections and images, and wandered hours alone looking for stairs upstairs. Exhausted, I rested against a concave surface and fell asleep. I woke when roused by hands, questioned by a mouth are you lost, and gazed upon by disembodied eyes, by a face every child knows from gradeschool from museum trips to see slaver John Quincy's embalmed statue of his dead wife Caroline, captured by
The Mirror
in every role from charwoman to Cleopatra. Hosanna, I stammered, and the dislocated items joined into a woman's shape. How did you know my name, she smiled as I gathered my senses.

I told her about Habib, and Laila sends her greetings, I said. I told her about my encounter with Masoud Rana and his disappearance behind an unreflective mirror. He and I run this boardinghouse; he just walked an unusual mirror malfunction but he'll turn up; I'll show you the room myself in the meantime, she pointed ahead.

THE RE-EMPLOYMENT OFFICE

What ambiguous torments. What nameless interrogations assailed me soon after. And why.

Recall, though I haven't told you, it had been four years since Q accepted a job at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Mogadishu and that the Boy with the Backward Conch went with her crowded airport concourse still gripping his backward shell smiling at the side-selling juice and snacks salesmen loud hawking wares watch them walk into hollow metal fuselage. I remember shivering T-shirt in air conditioning light antiseptic odour fresh washed floors wonder walking distance to Mogadishu. I remember recalling at that time how, years earlier, Q had showed me a DV winning lottery ticket, a Diversity Visa with date and time and air travel information above a holographic New York City landscape, and how she had brushed that forever aside for my embrace that evening and many evenings since, how with my hesitation before responding to her request will you come/ wait let me think, wait because New York from an unnameable country is tricky gangster-steps/ wait because Mogadishu is a fresh bucking horse, as
I said to her when she asked me follow, differently, years later/ I had lost her to the in-between oblivion of an airplane hangar. I wished her departure was a dream from which I would wake up to even the painful reality of her breathing into my lungs on the Hospice floor, wake up, Hedayat, death is a dream, always in the future. I'll visit you, I yelled through the fog window reflection shattered glass insides. I stepped back to look at my right hand at belly weeping blood.

There was no explosion no visible wound, but it crunched glass when I walked and hurt like hell to sit down or to dream. I wore gauze and a tensor bandage around my stomach to tie the bleeding, and when I convinced the bloodstream abate, I wore it anyway as a precaution. The air of the Ghost Hospice became unbreathable without Q. By games of chess with the most senile ghosts, I began a life after death that lasted a pawn's move, knight's gallop, at most a bishop's far diagonal extension across tabletop. Game after game, the ghosts helped narrate a desert existence until I acclimatized to life without her until the day they hauled me face-first into car and jailed me in a room with one fibreglass window that let only the most temeritous light clamber in.

Time passes.

Year and year and year and year: I think of the hourglass trickle of sand behind heavy metal door. I lie in bed eat an onion weep quietly counting time with thumb and the lines of my forefinger: four years and another woman lives in my blood, I realize, astonished: Hosanna, she rattles and stones, daggers, penumbra, parched throat arterial flow, many cigarettes in one night in search of her, Hosanna. Hosanna, Masoud's girlfriend, my brother's wife, runs the Ghost Hospice with him and co-owns the boardinghouse where as a newly freed inmate I've taken up residence despite its mirror-labyrinth. Why did I choose this place. Apart from my cellmate's prophetic dice roll, recall such houses aren't unusual, initially having served as movie sets in
The Mirror
before being auctioned to the public. Though expensive, they're often
converted into international hotels and hostels and are major tourist attractions in the unnameable country. I look around at wall hanging painting, a bookshelf, and a bedside table with its ornate crystalware, the room's posh carpet drags and I think of the mirror-passages I just crossed to arrive here. This is a drug dealer's estate, I think to myself. I wonder how Masoud made the money to build a palace; we were small time when Black Organs picked me up fuzz pedal to my brain and back seat of a sedan.

I lie awake thinking and casting Hosanna's shadow into the grey mist of my room where the light refuses to penetrate, making there the image of Hosanna and Masoud, of Masoud and Hosanna in their various, and does she ever call on me at that time to lie together this way or that way. I roll on my side and think of the coincidence of Masoud after all these years, I think of Hosanna, her face an exact mirror-cut of Caroline Quincy's glacial visage that from history textbooks television programs and toothpaste commercials all the kids know. Where did he pick her up, I wonder. In the coming days, I see him with kitchenware at feeding hours, in the equipment room grabbing balance balls for the undead, I see Masoud with Hosanna. How strange to work beside her wax museum, her television figure, beside Caroline Margarita mixing blood bags or serum with eggs parsley flour. Strange to return to the Halfway House, and stranger to inhabit it without Q.

What ambiguous torments until Hosanna asks me whether she can accompany me to the Public Records Department to inquire about procedures of hiring ghosts at halfway house establishments. Ghosts have recently joined our staff and I realized we should gather official assent for their continued employment. Hosanna had heard of our recent increase of blood bags from hospital raids and donations, of pistil and stamen flower foliage, coriander and fennel smells efflorescence and spice that now radiated house atmosphere the buzz excitement of new hires.

A ghost named Gibreel wide-eyed watched us bottle blood and wanted help us, keen, young, very much alive despite death. Gibreel of the swift hands punk plumose hair, of few but precise words measured blood portions new clients, wrote names on sheets changed clothes from corpsecloth to streetwear, an important volunteer before we decided to make him a salary man.

There was also Surayya, whose tears wouldn't curb even after doctors pronounced her hearthalted, dead. Unmoving as a tombstone she kept weeping for so long her family postponed her burial until her body began to smell. Rise from death without a thought of pastfuture, for a bloody drink. If it wasn't for a Halfway House team making cemetery rounds waft platelet odours through window to draw attention, to guide her to bath after death, registration, rest, she probably would have wandered indefinitely. Surayya's luck: her blinding thirst guiding to car, bottle of red to lips from my own hands as sit, I bid, sit, I asked, until she sat, got inside the vehicle, and Masoud Rana and I could drive her to the house where ghosts arrived singly, daily, on their own accord or in droves at our bidding.

Masoud asked Surayya about her sadness, and she couldn't speak, he asked/ leave her alone, I argued, but Masoud insisted official sheets, resisted, Halfway House rules, he reiterated as always in such cases until I demanded enough or the ghost in question declaimed, as with Surayya: my husband disappeared, my neighbour also left vanish as only remainder. Bring a mirror, she said, and showed us a bullet wound still weeping neck, secret to the unreflected image.

Dark night quiet steps, she explained how her house slept a cabaletta of muzzled shots. Celerity and mysterious indemnity reign as this government's night motions, no one said.

We gave her a nametag and a blood ration card, she stayed until we adjusted to the idea she wanted to make the Halfway House her home. Salt and yogurt, she demanded, took cloves and pepper, turned
blood drinks for sustenance into cuisine art, as our shelter became a restaurant for the undead, as the Halfway House resumed an atmosphere we knew when Q was still here. Music filled the rooms, and Surayya's weeping turned into an admixture of emotions punctuated by plosive laughter manic tears. Though a difficult case, we thought the job would help busy her through life after death.

The Halfway House is a shelter, however, and has few posts for hire. We direct the majority of ambulant ghosts to the Re-Employment Office because it carries lists of jobs at institutions willing to hire the walking dead and ads for apartments around the country. I myself need to go there today because many new ghosts have arrived at the Re-Employment Office and by law we have to register them all, especially ghosts that we think can co-exist with the living so as to make room for others bound to appear due to an increase in the rise in spontaneous fires.

The events of the most recent such example were difficult to separate from cinema, but Journalists without Borders reported that a faction of the Islamic Justice Party, pinned in a neighbourhood languishing under an American blockade that hadn't allowed basic amenities to flow for weeks, accepted a surprise
Mirror
role as Hollywood villains for food. Cameras arrived in a convoy of trucks that also brought milk bread and fruit all fun fun for the gawking kids and their relieved guardians, arms outstretched. Then a flock of Justice Party terrorists who were probably terrorists were ambushed among the freeloaders by occupation army brush fire, and there were a lot of civilians there too. All the sounds turned militant and the bodies that could fled indoors. Within hours, after hundreds of magazines loaded reloaded, the entire region erupted without warning into a petrochemical blaze arising from an unspecified source. Luckily,
The Mirror
caught all the action.

At the appointed hour, I walk by Hosanna's door because she agreed to go with me to the Re-Employment Office that day. While I
sing a song under my breath, I think of the fire events in nearby neighbourhoods blaring television talk everywhere, and wonder how to make them sound conversational while imagining us dancing hand in hand through a government building's hallway and maze chambers whose diagrams are historically known as being unable to guide visitors, and who by word-of-mouth are advised to carry packed meals and sleeping bags because they might spend days for a simple excursion to the Re-Employment Office. But since I hear no human reply from behind her door, I walk corridors that were once open-air streets to the address everyone in our unnameable country knows, covered now by movie ceiling for sky, and I pass crowded visage and tremulous aquaria fish markets, marketers dancing chassé after reedy cries buy my wares.