Alif the Unseen (15 page)

Alif came to with a start. He frowned, wondering at what point he had fallen asleep. The pages beneath his fingers were beginning to pucker with sweat; hastily, he closed the book and put it
away in his backpack. The cab was circling up toward one of the ancient gates in the Old Quarter wall. He glanced at the convert in the rearview mirror: she was leaning against the car door on one
elbow, frowning out the window.

“You must know the Old Quarter very well by now,” he hazarded, “Better than most foreigners.”

She said nothing.

“Your Punjabi is also very good. I barely speak any at all.”

“For God’s sake, don’t make it worse.”

Mortified, Alif slumped in his seat until the rearview mirror reflected only off-white sky. They passed through the Old Quarter wall—a mundane color in the midday light—and rattled on
to cobbled roads lined with gracious stone houses. Wooden shutters over the windows protected the residents from the staring of passersby. Here and there, low-slung harem balconies extended out
over the street, their latticed arches reminders of a time when architectural mercies were the extent of an aristocratic woman’s public life.

The cab shuddered to a halt at the western edge of the Al Basheera campus. The buildings here were modern: glass boxes designed by some French architect with a perverse sense of humor who, now
that women were permitted to attend the university, apparently desired to put them on display. Classes were in session. Students went in and out of the glass doors in tight groups, the foreign ones
visible as clots of bare skin against the uniform banner of
thobes
and veils. A lone
chaiwallah
hawked his milk tea from a cart drawn up alongside the glass edifice, making him
look shabbier and it more pretentious than either could hope to do alone.

“Let’s go.” Straightening her head scarf, the convert stepped out of the cab. Alif was gratified when she let him pay—if she was really angry, he reasoned, she would have
tried to pay herself. He followed her toward the nearest building: outside were two security guards flanking a metal detector, searching students and their bags as they went inside. Alif felt
adrenaline bloom in his body.

“This is where it gets tricky,” the convert muttered. She pushed back her shoulders. “Give me your backpack. It’s too nice for a menial.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just give it to me for a minute. I’ll give it back.”

Frowning, Alif handed the convert his backpack. She slung it over one shoulder.

“Okay. Now look like a bored, downtrodden migrant worker.” The convert strode confidently up to the younger of the two guards, her passport in hand.

“Excuse me,” she said in English, with an exaggerated, high-pitched American accent, “I’m so sorry, but my driver left his keys downstairs when he came to pick me
up—can we run back in and get them?”

The guard leered at her. “You are Muslim?”

“Il
hamd
ulilah.”

“You looking nice Muslim husband?”

“In
sha
llah.” With a modest, downcast smile, the convert walked through the metal detector. Alif shuffled after her, not daring to look either guard in the eye. No one
stopped him. When he glanced over his shoulder, the guards were rummaging lazily through a veiled woman’s large Prada bag. No tension shadowed their faces; no indication that they had even
noticed him. He was simply a rich woman’s accessory.

“Well, well,” came a voice at his ear. “You do have a talent or two of the hidden folk.”

Alif brightened. Vikram bobbed along beside him as they made their way down the hall. The students hurrying to and from classrooms swerved around him without looking.

“Did you see that?” The convert bustled toward them, flushed with triumph. “Wasn’t I right? They didn’t even ask for your ID! They—”

She stopped short when she noticed Vikram. He grinned at her wolfishly.

“How did
you
get in here?” she demanded.

“Through that door, the same as you did.”

The convert drew a breath as though preparing for a retort. Instead, she let it out again and turned away.

“Fine. Whatever. I don’t want to know. The lab is down this way.” She let Alif’s backpack drop at his feet. He shouldered it and followed her. At the end of the hall was
a glass-enclosed room with modish recessed lighting and row upon row of flat-screened monitors, about half of which were in use. Along the wall were workstations with embedded clusters of electrical
outlets and data ports. The scent of working metal and the whir of machines greeted Alif as the convert opened the door. He sighed with sheer joy, quickening his steps to catch the door before it
swung shut behind her.

Vikram chuckled as he slid into the lab in Alif’s wake.

“So happy to see so much dead wire. Tell me, younger brother, do you get this excited about living flesh? I will judge you on your answer.”

“I don’t care,” said Alif. He tossed his backpack onto a chair at an empty workstation. “And it’s not dead. It’s just another kind of alive.” He took
out his netbook and examined the data ports in the wall.

“TNova,” he said reverently. “They’ve got TNova. The connection speed is so fast that a Web site practically loads before you’ve had time to type the whole
address.”

“Well, I’m glad you like it. They jacked up tuition to pay for this place.” The convert stood over him with her hands on her hips, looking mollified. “If you give me the
book, I’ll take it down to the archival science department. I’ll have to take paper samples, but I’ll make them as small as I can.”

Alif extracted the book from his pack and handed it to her.

“Be careful,” he fretted.

The convert sniffed. “You should be careful. You’re the one who’s lugging it around in the heat and the dust like a high school biology textbook.” She tucked the
manuscript under her arm and turned to go.

“Thank you,” said Alif to her retreating back. She didn’t answer. He pursed his lips in frustration.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Vikram, crouching at his feet. “I’m sure you haven’t been more of an ass than usual.”

“You’re the ass,” Alif muttered. He plugged in his netbook and waited for it to identify the TNova connection. Five muscular bars appeared at the top of his screen, alongside a
megabytes-per-second ratio among the highest he’d ever seen. Within a few clicks he was inside the cloud. It hummed with information, half-finished programs posted for feedback, jokes written
in code—the electrical thoughts of isolated people. Alif felt his shoulders relax. All problems are simply interruptions in the transmission and preservation of data, he reminded himself. He
had been projecting needless fear and anxiety onto his situation: he must stay calm and rationally eliminate the barriers between himself and his return to normal life, one by one.

As he studied the cloud’s community portal, his serenity evaporated. On an ordinary day data turnover in the cloud was rapid, but Alif saw that many of his friends’ posts were
several days old. Some had logged on only to leave cryptic messages in leetspeak, many of which were directed at him.

Alif stifled a cry of surprise. After his dramatic retirement, NewQuarter had disappeared off the face of the blogosphere and was now spoken of only in terms of hushed awe and contempt. Some
said he had been arrested, others that he didn’t have the stomach for real danger. Alif had remained aloof and cultivated no opinion, ashamed that he could feel abandoned by someone he had
never met.

Alif ran his fingers through his hair and tightened them until he could feel tension against his scalp.

“Shit, shit,
shit
.”

Several students turned to shoot him looks of near-identical disgust. Alif hunched his shoulders and ignored them. A hissing cackle came from beneath his desk, where Vikram had somehow managed
to cram himself.

“Listen to this foul language. Were you raised in a brothel?”

“Would you get out from under there?”

“No.”

Alif ground his teeth and opened up a new browser window. Logging on to a large, generic Web mail provider, he created a new e-mail address using a random string of letters and numbers. When he
typed Intisar’s address in the “To” field of a blank message, an unexpected rush of tenderness overcame him. To think that she might be nearby—that she might be in class at
this very moment, or shopping at one of the small boutiques they had passed in the cab—was too much for his rational mind. He felt himself disappear into his heart and guts, ignoring the risk
of detection and capture that even this anonymous contact would pose.
Hayam,
his mother would call it: love that stumbles over the earth in broken ecstasy.

He remembered a thousand things at once: the subtle turns of phrase that convinced him she was different in the same way he was different, that she had a superior mind and fought the same
internal battles against the monotonous demands of daily life. There was not one e-mail from her that he had not read a dozen times over, not one pretty compliment, delivered with just the right
level of modest reserve, that he could not recall. No other woman had ever flattered him. Occasionally his mother would propose one or another of the dull-eyed neighborhood girls as a potential
match, but when Alif met them they inevitably responded to his nervous, polite questions with one-word answers and he would leave feeling depressed. With Intisar it was different. She had pursued
him as passionately as he pursued her, employing a kind of arch, feminine elusiveness that made her interest all the more maddening. He had, despite himself, been intrigued by her wealth. He spent
so much time deriding the elite online that his relationship with Intisar seemed doubly transgressive, and the idea that a girl—a woman—with money wanted him was not unwelcome to his
ego.

The need to see her again overwhelmed all other considerations.

3:30 pm at the chaiwallah’s in the new campus,
he wrote.
I love you
.

He hit
send
before giving himself time to think. Pushing his chair back from the workstation, he stretched, nervous muscles shuddering in his arms and legs. He had two and a half hours
until the appointed time. Hunching back over his netbook, he ran a query for de la Croix on a black hat-built search engine. The first few results were about a nineteenth-century painter; he
discarded these. He clicked on an entry labeled
Les Mille et Un Jours
: