The Mirage: A Novel (14 page)

“She is. And you, Waj, aren’t you working with the senator on some sort of legislation?”

“Yes. I’ve been lobbying her on Uncle—on Governor Gaddafi’s behalf, about the new telecommunications bill . . .”

“Good luck with that,” Amal said.

“Well,” said Waj, moving right along. “Let’s get down to business, shall we?” He retreated behind his desk, a massive executive cockpit equipped with multiple computer screens. “Please, all of you, sit down. Tell me what the House of Wisdom can do for Homeland Security . . .”

They sat. Mustafa described his interrogation of Costello and the search of Costello’s apartment, then gave an edited version of the meeting in Farouk’s office. He omitted all mention of Idris and spoke of the president only indirectly, saying that they had been asked “by Riyadh” to look further into the mirage legend. “We thought if anyone would know about a new Christian myth making the rounds, it would be you, Waj,” he concluded.

“ ‘The mirage,’ hmm . . .” Waj tapped on his desktop keyboard, consulted his screens. “It doesn’t look like there’s anything in my databases yet . . . You say this is related to rapture theology?”

“It’s a theory.”

“Yes, well, that would make sense. These rapturists, they’re like any Christian End Times cult, always expecting the apocalypse next week, and then when next week comes and the world’s still here, they fall all over themselves trying to explain why. With so much theological innovation it’s hard to keep up, even with computers . . . Tell me more about these objects you found. Can I see some of them?”

Mustafa opened his attaché and passed the map of the mirage Middle East to Wajid.

Waj spotted it immediately: “Israel is in Palestine?”

Mustafa shrugged. “God willing, anything is possible.”

“Heh, and Kirkuk is part of Iraq. The guys who manage the Kurdish edition of the Library would love
that
.” Waj laughed. “This is actually kind of cool, in a completely demented way. Is there more?”

Mustafa showed him the newspaper they’d found in Costello’s apartment. “
The New York Times
,” Wajid read, his English as good as Mustafa’s. “ ‘All the news that’s fit to print . . .’ ”

“It’s a ghost paper,” Mustafa said. “According to our research, there was a
New York Times
, but it was shut down by the American government in 1971 for revealing state secrets. The publishers were executed for treason.”

“Well, it looks real enough. Professionally printed.”

“That photo is obviously a fake, though,” Samir put in. “What do you think, Waj? Photoshop?”

“Could be.” He pointed to the bottom right-hand corner of the front page, where a rectangle of newsprint had been neatly excised. “What happened here? Somebody clip out a recipe?”

“We’re not sure how that happened,” Mustafa said. He’d first noticed the cutout about an hour before he received the call informing him Gabriel Costello was dead. “There are some pages missing from the inside, as well.”

“Would it be all right if I made a copy of this?” Waj asked. “I’d like to read it through, maybe show it to a couple of my research guys.”

“As long as you keep it in-house.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t post it on the Library . . . Hmm, that’s interesting.”

“What?”

“According to this, these September 11 attacks took place on a Tuesday.”

“Sure, just like 11/9,” Mustafa said.

“Yes,” said Waj, “that’s the problem . . .” He pulled up a calendar on one of his computer screens. “Yeah, see: September 11, 2001, was a Saturday, not a Tuesday.”

Samir snorted. “What a surprise, even the date is fictional.”

Wajid stared at the calendar. “You think about it, it’s too bad September 11
wasn’t
a Tuesday . . .”

“Why?” said Mustafa.

“Because then November 9 would have been a Friday.”

Friday: first day of the weekend. Mustafa heard the Fairfax preacher:
Come the rapture, I know
I
won’t be home . . .
“The towers would have been empty.”

“Empti
er
, anyway,” Waj said. “Janitors, security people, probably some office workers clocking overtime. But the restaurant would have been closed, and the evacuation would have gone a lot faster . . .”

Samir, bemused, said: “What are you talking about?”

“In Christian countries, the weekend starts on Saturday,” Mustafa explained. “Or Sunday.”

“Yeah, I
know
that,” Samir said. “And I know crusaders can be idiots. But do you really think they wouldn’t have checked to make sure the towers would be open for business that day?”

“What if they hadn’t, though?” Mustafa said. Just imagine it: the planes, themselves emptier because of the holy day, crashing into mostly vacant offices, silent halls and stairwells. Of course it still would have been a great tragedy, and the shock of the towers’ destruction would not have been lessened in the slightest. But once the smoke cleared and word began to spread of the even greater tragedy so miraculously averted, might history not have proceeded down a different path? Maybe leveler heads would have prevailed. Maybe the pointless war with America could have been called off. The thought of this alternate reality, in which not only the thousands of lost soldiers but even that silly Fairfax preacher got to live out their natural lives, filled Mustafa with a sudden, irrational joy.

Then he thought, Fadwa, and his joy faded.

“Dude,” Wajid said, reading some or all of this in his expression. “Forget about it. Samir’s right. They would have checked.”

“I know,” Mustafa said.

“And even if they hadn’t . . . The guy who sold them the plane tickets would have said something.”

Waj stepped out of his office to arrange the copying of the newspaper and Samir tagged along with him. Mustafa and Amal remained seated, both looking quietly out the window.

“ ‘Number three,’ ” Amal said finally, unable to help herself.

“I apologize for that,” Mustafa said, embarrassed. “I assure you I’ve told Waj nothing about you that would imply an inappropriate relationship. But he has a fertile imagination, and he lacks a proper filter between his brain and his mouth.”

“So I gather.”

“Also, he takes a very personal interest in my marital affairs. He’s prouder of my marriage to Noor than I am at this point; he believes he’s responsible for it.”

“And why is that? Did he introduce you to her?”

“No,” Mustafa said. “He made it possible for me to afford to marry her. Stock options,” he explained. “Waj sold me some of his shares in eBazaar, a few months before the IPO.”

“EBazaar! But you must be rich, then. Why are you still in government service?”

“I
would
be rich, if I’d taken all the shares Waj offered me. But I decided to hedge my bet by investing in some other Internet stocks that didn’t perform nearly as well . . . Still, it was quite a windfall. I
thought
I was rich. Rich enough to behave very stupidly, for a while.”

“Forgive me,” Amal said, “but I still don’t understand how you could do such a thing.”

“Oh, it’s not hard. There’s actually an 800 number you can call, to get information on the practicalities of taking multiple wives. A website, too, government-funded, courtesy of Al Saud . . . At least that used to be the case. I suppose your mother’s efforts in Congress may have led to some changes.”

“That isn’t what I—”

“I know what you meant,” Mustafa said. “The short answer is, you do it by deliberately confusing what is permitted with what is right. Money makes the confusion easier.” He looked at her, then continued in a softer tone: “It’s OK, I don’t expect you to understand. You kind of had to be there.”

T
HE
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IBRARY OF
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Female infertility

(Redirected from
Barren
)

Female infertility
is a condition in which a woman either cannot
conceive
or cannot carry a
pregnancy
to term. There are many types of infertility and many possible causes, such as
genetic defects
,
physical abnormalities
,
hormonal disorders
, and the effects of various
diseases
.

Female infertility is one of the most common grounds for
divorce
 . . .

F
adwa was praying to the Virgin Mary on the night Mustafa met Noor.

Mustafa had known Fadwa since childhood. She was the daughter of his mother’s oldest friend, and whenever Umm Mustafa went home to visit her family in downstate Iraq, or when Fadwa’s parents came up to Baghdad, the two of them ended up playing together. When he was very young, Mustafa’s sisters sometimes teased him by saying that he and Fadwa were going to be married one day.

Then, just as the two of them were reaching an age when boys and girls were expected to play separately, Fadwa’s father got a job abroad, in America of all places. Umm Mustafa was sad to see her friend leave, but she was also excited, because she thought her own dreams of travel would now be realized. But visiting Fadwa’s mother in her new home proved insurmountably difficult: Americans were stingy with tourist visas, and both times that Umm Mustafa successfully navigated the bureaucracy, the trip had to be canceled at the last minute, once because Abu Mustafa couldn’t get leave from the university and once because of Umm Mustafa’s declining health.

Mustafa’s mother had been dead three years by the time he saw Fadwa again. He’d just finished college and started working at Halal. He’d heard Fadwa’s family was back in Iraq—her father’s American job a casualty of the Gulf War—but still he was surprised to get a letter from her, an invitation to her brother’s wedding. He almost didn’t go. He was on assignment that weekend, a stakeout in Samarra, but at the last moment he got Samir to cover for him and drove south to the village where his mother had been born.

Fadwa had grown into a beautiful young woman. Mustafa spent most of the wedding party hovering around her, and late in the day the two of them went for a stroll through the village, visiting their childhood haunts. Little about the place had changed, with the exception of the broad irrigation canal that now ran through the fields to the west. Numerous signs proclaimed the canal a “gift” of the Baath Labor Union.

Fadwa told Mustafa that her father was thinking of joining Baath. “He doesn’t want to—he doesn’t like or trust Saddam Hussein—but he’s had a terrible time finding work since we got back from America.”

“He is right not to trust Saddam,” Mustafa said, going on to explain that the canal-building project, pushed through the state legislature with a series of bribes, was really an elaborate revenge plot. “The Shia smuggler gangs along the Persian border refused to join Saddam’s syndicate, so as punishment he’s draining the marsh out from under them.” As for the many innocent marshlanders whose ancient way of life was being destroyed, Saddam didn’t care about them. Neither did the federal government, unfortunately. “My boss has been trying to get the Environmental Protection Agency involved in the case—they actually have more power than Halal when it comes to this sort of thing. But Iraqis apparently don’t qualify as an endangered species.”

“So it falls to you then,” Fadwa said, smiling at his seriousness. “You’ll have to get the old gangster yourself.”

“Well, I am going to try,” said Mustafa, smiling back.

Several months later, Mustafa’s sisters and aunts met formally with the women of Fadwa’s family to hammer out the details of a marriage contract. Once that was taken care of, the men got together and had a barbeque. Mustafa and Fadwa’s wedding was in June. With money from Mustafa’s family, they got a starter house in the suburban district of New Baghdad.

That first year of their marriage was a happy one, though to Mustafa looking back later it often seemed like something that had happened to another person. Those were the days when he once more strove to be a proper Muslim: praying regularly, giving to charity, fasting during Ramadan. Much of what he did, he did to please Fadwa, just as he’d once done it to please his mother, but pleasing her gave him a sense of fulfillment that felt very much like righteousness. The sense of fulfillment carried over to his work. People sometimes referred to Halal agents as “God’s policemen” because they enforced purity laws; Mustafa preferred to think of his job as protecting the weak against exploitation by the wicked, but either way you looked at it, it was a banner year for the God squad. They seized a lot of contraband and locked up a lot of bad people, and even the old gangster Saddam seemed, for a time, tantalizingly within reach.

The trouble began the following year, when Fadwa’s family came to visit them in Baghdad during the Festival of Sacrifice. Fadwa’s mother commented repeatedly on the fact that Fadwa wasn’t pregnant yet. What were they waiting for? Was there some problem? Mustafa, figuring these were the pro forma expressions of concern that mothers-in-law were supposed to make, paid them little mind. Fadwa was badly shaken, though. After her parents went home, she broke down and confessed to Mustafa that she’d been keeping a family secret from him. One of her maternal grandmother’s sisters had been divorced by her husband after she proved incapable of bearing children. Not only did he literally kick her out of the house, he blamed her infertility on immoral behavior, a vile accusation that she denied, but that so shamed her she ended up committing suicide.

Mustafa listened gravely to this story but failed to take it as seriously as he should have. Family honor was important and memories were long, but the events Fadwa described had occurred before either of them had even been born. More importantly, Mustafa had come to take his own good fortune for granted, seeing the past year’s joy as a natural state of affairs rather than a blessing that might not last. This arrogance blinded him to the depth of Fadwa’s fear.

“Your great-aunt’s husband sounds like a monster,” he said when she’d finished. “And what happened was a tragedy. But it’s got nothing to do with us.”