Fire in the Unnameable Country (41 page)

While they turn onto another echoing hallway, which leads them to the correct room, allow me, friends and enemies, to provide you a brief history of Department 6119. What is Department 6119. And what do they say of Department 6119. Recall the untold history: many years earlier, John Quincy, oldhaggard and bedridden with boils all over his skin, not from some plague but a gruesome infection of lovesickness, is haunted by what he believes is the kidnapping of his wife, Caroline Margarita. In search of a palliative, he turns the dial of his bedside radio for some music or news or dramatic performance and lands on an in-between frequency only to discover strange electrostatic oscillations and the faint monomaniacal voice of a person speaking to himself: not an outer voice but an inner, a human mind, he is sure, and belonging to someone, no less, that he recognizes from the days of his military
service. Recall, as it is said: he throws back the sheets and gathers his, rings the bedside bell, and then a wild cry Bovaire Bovaire, he calls, the British have landed.

The doctor is astonished: he himself is one of the few to know and was informed only an hour earlier, how on earth could Quincy have realized. Against the Maroons and during John Quincy's short rule following the insurgency the discovery of this alternate use of radio— which Bovaire called a natural extension of the instrument, since the mind, too, is merely the collection intersection interaction of waves— was not developed into systematic information gathering or intelligence. Quincy seemed the only one capable of manipulating an ordinary shortwave radio to pick up on the insights of a faraway unsuspecting mind. And even for him it was an inaccurate art, since most often he had no clue on whose thoughts he was trespassing. Others denounced the whole scientific basis of the endeavour and declared it as nothing more than the evanescent loony business of a pirate emperor who was fading day by day into the unreality of bhakti, of worshipping his dead mannequin wife.

Juan Baltazar, however, always fascinated by everything Quincy did, and who never lost faith in his predecessor, even when the other went mad and was said to have become a ghost, supposedly haunting the countryside of the continent, insisted on the recruitment of radio operators who would be able to spy on thoughts. Only one in every two thousand of those tested had some satisfactory ability to perform the operation, but slowly, during Baltazar's tenure as governor of the unnameable country, a small department furtively grew, and was eventually added as an arm of the British Intelligence Service in the Heart of Arabia (BISHA).

While the problem of whose thoughts exactly appeared over the airwaves on each occasion was never successfully solved, information sharing between the various branches of BISHA reduced it somewhat,
and the clean smokeless rooms—Department 6119 always kept a pious atmosphere, and many activities, including cigarette-smoking, had been banned from the start—filled with keen, dog-eared radio operators that rose up to successfully defend against large drug trafficking attempts, coups d'état, and, once, even against an external invasion. Or so it was said. Arrests of suspects led inevitably to torture but often revealed nothing, or revealed the recorded thoughts as nothing more than a passing fancy or technological errors resulting in misinterpretation: no, a criminal would insist, even under great suffering, that thought interrupted by reel static is thought of film recollection plus conversation about recent plosive events with friend.

But the department was never abolished for an important reason. In fact, its Wall of Red is more important now since the fall of communism, more important than ever because now is terrorism and still features taped-up Polaroid faces of sports heroes, actors, directors, writers, schoolteachers, volunteers: could be anybody, your local anything. Do this: first discover cracks in a red life, what department hacks joke about as the AIDS Narrative (he has AIDS, he fucked his, stole from, was late for, never did his homework when) before driving this virus silent into the community with the instruction be quiet and very loud while saying it because there is more about him. Until: drive the infected individual running crying confused to motherfriend, incorporate him weakened shivering back into the folds of the unnameable country. Finally: pat yourself on the back with the knowledge you can defend yourself against any threat, movie star, terrorist, whatever, and even more important, that you can bristle all the backs of the unnameable country at once and coordinate everyone twenty-four hours and fearful proper. In short, Department 6119 was important because it knifestruck fear deep into the heart of the general populace of not only the unnameable country but throughout the continent and beyond, as rumours spread wildly and some claimed that 6119 now had the
capacity to spy on everyone's thoughts and that it was impossible to know who was not 6119, who was or was not being targeted used for. A nimbus cloud settled over our mood and has since governed all our conversations and daily exchanges.

Down the hall and to the right, second room on the left. An enormous room divided and subdivided into cubicles. A deep hum in his intestines and the occasional squeal of a radio dial heard through the headphones of an operator. Hundreds, countless operators.

Is this all of them, Zachariah asked.

The bald man laughed, No, there are many other rooms. This is one room of Collections Subdivision, the largest of three subdepartments, whose purpose you know to some degree, though its functions are more nuanced as you will come to learn with time.

Then there is Assembly, his companion explained, in which the thoughtreels are cut and glued to order the thoughts of a single criminal (since one thoughtreel, due to the inaccuracy of the initial and subsequent locating processes, could contain impressions of the mind of more than a single individual, and, in fact, this was where mistakes were common, he did not reveal). After that authority passes on to Inspection, which edits and corrects any errors made by Assembly and decides whether to continue monitoring a suspect or to order an arrest. Ultimately, however, it is the executive council of the Governor's office that determines the length of interrogations after receiving a report from BISHA, whose hierarchies play decisive roles in determining the case outcomes.

Zachariah Ben Janoun shivered, recalled his volume of poetry and how it had inspired rebellious nationalist political debates among the professor and his friends, realized that if suspected, one was stripped of all possessions, and more than anything that meant the extraction and cauterization of memory itself; torture could do that, it was the point of torture to claw to penetrate so deeply inside. That his unwritten blank
verses might contain dissident opinions, unbeknownst to the author, filled him with dread; he needed to forget them immediately but how. Equally, perhaps more important, he needed to retrieve all copies of
Orange Blossoms
, and decided at once he would contact the publisher, the small bookstores where they were sold, and track down each of their owners, smash rocks through windows, to steal them back if need be. Perhaps Department 6119 was simply teasing him, showing him the blade the night before the act of qurbanor ritual sacrifice. He had never heard of such a nefarious roundabout way of capturing a potential terrorist, but fear gnawed at his entrails and suddenly all the onions and coffee from the previous night twisted inside and he needed badly to shit. But he tightened his continence and silenced his crowding thoughts.

As they passed through the maze of cubicles he was met with the bedraggled sidereal glances of so many individuals that he lost count of their souls or what miseries might rule their daily lives. He had heard that the suicide rate of radio operators was very high, and could imagine many asphyxiating reasons. But then a gaze leapt out of that atmosphere. It was her, the woman with the grey eyes whom he had seen but once at a border crossing while wrapped up in his own song. She didn't look at him so much as through him, to some other time or distant location, and it was a quick glance before she returned to her dial. But as he and the man passed her cubicle, Zachariah Ben Janoun noted her posture, the curvature of her spine, the colour of her neck peering out of an ordinary cream-coloured blouse, and his curiosity was heightened, his blood rushed through vessels, and in an instant, he imagined several possible bright futures. He wondered if some operator or another, dialing through the infinite frequencies, was able to catch his mind at that moment, but he doubted it very much, and anyway what he felt was hardly a crime.

The other departments, the man was saying, as they turned around and followed a complex route out of Collections Subdivision 1,
which did not involve a second encounter with the woman, who will be known to you in time, if you will excuse me, he said as they returned to the hallway, I have several important tasks to complete before tomorrow and I'll attend to them now, and he scurried away with surprising haste. The job begins tomorrow at eight-thirty sharp, he spoke over his shoulder, and his echo faded to a near whisper with the increasing distance, report to the Assembly Department on the ninth floor and they will show you to your workstation.

Zachariah Ben Janoun found himself alone in the hallway and without a way out. There had been no time to ask. The only directions he had noticed in the whole facility were located on a plaque that hung in the front foyer before the first hallway prior to the staircase adjacent to the elevator, useless to him presently. He was exhausted from the events of the day, and had not realized from all the excitement and novelty how much this building drained him of half his blood. He felt so weak he wanted to lie down in the deserted hallway for a moment, only a moment, and to close his eyes. The twists and turns and strange echoes. When he finally saw the front door at the far corner of the arid first corridor, he inwardly rejoiced. When he put a shoulder against its heavy body, however, he felt the impact of a large animal against the wood and a sound like a panther's growl. The bullmastiffs. They barked viciously. How could he have forgotten.

Now what. For more than a single reason, Zachariah Ben Janoun wanted to strip naked and weep, eating raw onion after onion and bury himself in the verses of E.E. Cummings. How did one leave this place. He stepped back and the walls fluttered in a slight breeze. His body did it everywhere, limbs chest head and all tiny tremors. He put his back against the wall near the door and sat utterly defeated. After a very long time, he heard a whistle in the distance and the animals, he heard, responded to it with their quick gait. It was safe to go, he imagined.

ASSEMBLERS AND COLLECTORS

Zachariah Ben Janoun watched the assembly of a magnetic tape of recorded thoughts. He had come prepared with a notebook and pen, but his supervisor insisted that junior members of Department 6119 never write anything; all employees were required to memorize, and to communicate in spoken language only.

Zachariah breathed a sigh of relief because he could barely read anymore; he had spent another restless night, this one roving from book to book, convincing himself he was reading
The Enormous Room
but knowing it was a delusion, as it was only because he knew all the verses by heart that the letters supplied meaning. Lesser-known works were more difficult to decipher, while the newspaper would have been impossible without looking at the photographs of presidents kissing babies, crowning pageant queens, or generals receiving orders of valour. He sighed as he bit into an onion, though he was far less lachrymose tonight, he noticed: one spends a lifetime gathering knowledge and is rendered an invalid in a day.

The supervisor showed him the tools of his new craft: a pair of
scissors, a sharp putty knife, two reels, a tape machine that spun them, and large headphones, like those in Collections. One had to be careful and wear latex gloves when handling the magnetic tape, because the tiniest scratch could delete an important word or sound and jeopardize the case against a terror suspect. In the future, the supervisor informed, we will be able to tune in to images of the mind as well, but for the moment, we must be content simply to trespass on sounds. The job for novices like Zachariah Ben Janoun was to determine the primary speaking voice of a thoughtreel, the monologist or subject. Minds are extremely varied, heterogeneous within the same person depending on time and mood, he was told, sometimes secondary voices intercede, and with experience, one learns deftly to sift out the thoughts of a schizophrenic or the return of an old memory in a healthy mind, among other

Zachariah's mind left the conversation, wandered corymb-stalks of hallways he had caught whispers of on his way to the office with Supervisor. While Assembly is closer to the Governor's judgment, he tuned back to the speaker, thus higher up the bureaucratic staves, Supervisor was explaining, it is, in fact, a less challenging department in terms of the difficulty of individual tasks and the average length of time required for learning the required functions. Thus, it was not uncommon for employees of the Assembly Subdivision to be demoted, so to speak, to Collections if they were felt to excel at their work here. Zachariah Ben Janoun somehow preferred the darker atmosphere of this place to Collections, but the thought of those grey eyes released some scent into the air that intoxicated him. He must try to speak with her.