The Mirage: A Novel
Read The Mirage: A Novel Online
Authors: Matt Ruff
THE MIRAGE
Matt Ruff
FOR
MY PARENTS
When God wants to punish you,
He grants your wish.
—
AMERICAN PROVERB
Contents
Book Two: The Republic of Nebuchadnezzar
Book Three: The Glory and the Kingdom
Epilogue: The City of the Future
T
his is the day the world changes.
It’s 21 Shaban, year 1422 after the Hijra. Or as the international trade calendar would have it: November 9, 2001. Sunrise in Baghdad is at 6:25, and as the first rays strike the Tigris and Euphrates twin towers, an old man stands in the main dining room of the Windows on the World restaurant, gazing out at the city.
The morning commute is well under way, cars streaming in along the expressways from Fallujah, Samarra, Baqubah, and Karbala. Across the Tigris, the 6:30 Basra Limited loops around the old World’s Fair grounds and runs briefly parallel to the Sadr City El before both trains plunge underground into the central station. There’s traffic on the river, too: passenger and cargo barges, water taxis, the racing shells of the Baghdad U rowing team, the hydrofoil ferry from Kut.
Looking down at it all, the old man feels a sense of vertigo that has nothing to do with fear of heights. He tells himself it’s the motion, the city’s ceaseless motion, which the rush hour only amplifies.
The old man grew up in Yemen. His family owned a bakery, and he and his brothers all worked there. It was hard work, long hours, but every day, five times a day, everything stopped, employees and customers alike stepping out to go to mosque, leaving only a Christian behind to mind the ovens. It wasn’t just the town’s businesses that shut down: A witness viewing that landscape from above would have seen the roads empty too, even long-distance travelers pulling over to pray.
Baghdad, city of the future, doesn’t pull over for anything. Here when the old man steps out of the kitchen for dawn prayer, it’s not just Christians who stay behind working. Here attendance at mosque varies, as if it were the world’s schedule, not God’s, that needed to be accommodated. Here the traffic flows round the clock, pausing only for accidents and gridlock. Little wonder that the sight of it disorients him, producing the flutter in his chest and inner ear that says
This is not the place you were made for.
Or so he tells himself. But really, what else could it be?
Someone calls his name from the kitchen. It’s time to get back to work. There’s another round of pastries to get out before breakfast service starts at seven, and then he needs to begin prepping for lunch.
A helicopter buzzes past the windows, and the sun continues to rise, revealing a sky streaked by contrails. The heavens are in motion, too.
7:15 a.m. In a broadcast studio just blocks from the towers, Baghdad’s mayor, Anmar al Maysani, is appearing on the
Jazeera & Friends
morning talk show. Today’s topic is the skyrocketing murder rate: 463 people have been killed in Baghdad since January, and the year’s final tally is expected to top five hundred. It’s the worst violence the city has seen since the mob wars of the early ’90s.
The mayor has some explaining to do. After being introduced as a “noted feminist,” she’s braced to spend the allotted time discussing whether some jobs aren’t better left to men after all, and is surprised when the host’s first question is about another subject entirely.
“Madam Mayor, there are many who believe that the increase in lawlessness we are seeing is an inevitable consequence of the secularization of society, and that what’s needed is a new Awakening, a rejection of modernity and a return to traditional religious values. What do you say to this?”
“Well,” the mayor replies, “the first thing I would say is that God is great, and nothing is more important than the struggle to live righteously. If citizens are inspired to rededicate themselves to that struggle, that’s the best news that could come out of this unfortunate situation. But I don’t agree with the connection you’re trying to draw between so-called secularization and lawlessness. If you look closely at the statistics, you’ll find that the increase in murders is being driven by a rise in organized crime activity. When men turn to violence in their pursuit of illegal profits, the problem isn’t that they’ve failed to submit to God; the problem is that they’re gangsters.”
A dry cough from the show’s other guest, the publisher of the
Baghdad Post
, gets the host’s attention. “Mr. Aziz? You have a comment?”
“I’m just a poor Christian,” Tariq Aziz says, “and I wouldn’t dream of lecturing my Muslim brothers and sisters on the struggle to be righteous, but if men are choosing to become gangsters, that would seem to me a clear sign that they are
not
submitting to God . . .”
“Madam Mayor? Your response?”
“If Tariq Aziz feels he’s a
poor
Christian, I won’t argue with him,” the mayor says. “Perhaps it would benefit Mr. Aziz to contemplate a line from the Psalms of David: ‘I will not have an evildoer for a friend.’ There are several verses from chapter 63 of Holy Quran that I might also recommend to him . . .”
“I’d recommend the mayor review the laws against slander,” Aziz shoots back.
“I’m only too happy to focus on the law,” the mayor says. “It’s through law and order that we’ll solve this problem, God willing.”
“But that raises another issue, doesn’t it?” says the host. “For several years now, you’ve been the public face of the law in this city. And yet things have gotten worse.”
“Recently they have, but—”
“Yes, recently, even as you’ve been given greater authority by the city council. Some people might say that’s a sign you’ve been given too much authority, that you’re not up to the responsibilities of your office. Some might go farther, and say that God has placed a natural limit on how much responsibility any woman can handle, and that you’ve tried to exceed that limit, with predictable results.
Madam
Mayor . . . Your thoughts?”
7:59. Down by the river, it’s time for another round in the War on Drugs: A young boat pilot, having just tied up to a pier under the July 14th Bridge, finds himself surrounded, not by the smugglers he was expecting, but by uniformed agents of Halal Enforcement.
The lead agent is a big man named Samir with a bodybuilder’s physique. “Before you lie to me,” he says, wagging a warning finger in the youth’s face, “I want you to think about something. We know your name is Khalil Noufan. We knew you were coming here, and we know what your cargo is. We know you have an uncle Ziad who’s up to his ears in gambling debts. We know all that, so ask yourself: What else do we know?”
The boy blinks slowly, his expression suggesting he’ll never win any science prizes. When he speaks, it’s as if he’s reading off a cue card: “I’m transporting fruit.”
“Right.” Another agent has boarded the boat and is prodding a pile of boxes whose labeling indicates they contain bananas. Hearing a telltale clink, he jokes: “It must have been very cold out on the water this morning.” He tears open a box at the top of the pile and extracts a glass container. “Look at that, frozen in the shape of a wine bottle. What are the odds?”
The boat pilot blinks a bit faster and switches to his fallback story: “It’s for the Jews. To use in the main synagogue.”
Samir laughs. “You hear that, Isaac?” he says to the agent in the boat. “Your grand rabbi’s smuggling Sabbath wine again.”
“Ah, I hate it when he does that.”
Samir turns his attention back to the boy: “Why would Jews smuggle wine when they can import it legally?”
“To, to save on the taxes . . .”
“What, they’re going to risk jail for a few riyals?”
“They’re Jews!”
All of the agents laugh at this. On the boat, Isaac breaks the seal on the “wine” bottle and extracts the cork. He sniffs, then sips, the contents.
“Well?” Samir says.
“A fine Scottish vintage.” Isaac takes a more substantial swallow from the bottle. “Around eighty proof, I’d say.”
“ ‘Proof?’ ” The boat pilot is beyond his prepared script now. “What’s ‘proof’?”
“Hard liquor, asshole,” Samir tells him. “That’s a class-A felony charge. Multiple felony charges, if we decide to count each box as a separate shipment. How many boxes, Isaac?”
“At least forty. And it looks like there are two dozen bottles per box, so if you really want to be a hard-ass you could count them double.”
Samir whistles. “Eighty felony charges . . . And that’s with a mandatory five-year sentence per charge. I know you’re probably no good at math, but do you understand how fucked that makes you?”
“No! It’s wine! They told me—”
“ ‘They’ who? Hey!” Samir grabs him by the chin. “Look at me. Who hired you?”
“No one . . . The Jews.”
“The Jews!” Samir snorts in disgust. Still gripping the boy’s chin, he leans in close: “Eighty felony charges. That’s as good as a life sentence, you get that?”
“I . . . I . . .”
“Oh, that’s good, start crying. That’ll really help, where you’re going . . .” Leaning in even closer, as if for a kiss, his voice dropping to a seductive whisper: “You have beautiful eyes, you know that? The other prisoners at Abu Ghraib—I bet they’ll
love
those eyes . . .”
8:23. At Baghdad International Airport, a pair of ABI agents have set up a surveillance post on the roof of the air traffic control tower. The object of their interest is a palatial estate to the east, located on an island in the middle of an artificial lake. A causeway lined with other, lesser mansions links the island to the lakeshore, and the control tower offers an excellent vantage for recording the license plates of vehicles on the causeway.
While the male agent, Rafi, peers through a camera-equipped telescope at the estate, the woman, Amal, chats with an airport manager who’s followed them up here. Ostensibly the conversation is about a baggage-theft ring the manager claims to have knowledge of, but Amal suspects what he’s really after is her phone number.
“. . . Persians with forged work visas,” the manager is saying. “They sneak across the border through the marshlands and pay the local riffraff to provide them with fake papers.”
“Persians.” Amal grasps the subtext readily enough. The manager’s southern accent and dialect mark him as a native of the Gulf peninsula, and because Amal and Rafi are federal agents, he has apparently concluded that they are at least honorary Riyadhis—and Sunnis. As opposed to the no-good Persians and Iraqi marshlanders, who are Shia. “You know, we’re pretty familiar with the local riffraff,” she says, gesturing towards the lake estate, “and I have to tell you, he’s not so fond of Persians. Or the people of the marshes.”