Fire in the Unnameable Country (7 page)

Substrata oblivion minds: Mamun Ben Jaloun breathed the sad air summoned by his cart of gathered thought receptacles metal shine in darkness, the dichromate gasoline blaze wafting under the door of the furnace room that was of Archives professionals burning souls. He pushed his cart toward the strangehue.

The blast of light as Mamun Ben Jaloun entered the furnace room always made him cringe. He turned his head away from the guttural negative engine pumping fire onto magnetic tape as his hands opening metal popping containers reached into cranial cavity scooped out magnetic dead brains to fling into burning. Abd, an Incinerator of the Archives with a singular slave's name, would generally dispense the reels into fire, but my father liked to stay and sometimes pass words on Abd's sick daughter pleurisy or whooping cough couldn't quite recall, on their respective jobs of burning human minds. Ask Abd, father: how many dead souls destined for incineration that day dozens scores hundreds always growing.

When the daily incinerated reels rose to a thousand-count in his quadrant, Mamun Ben Jaloun began a mental inventory because any written calculation would obviously be seized as he exited the Archives. His simple calculation multiplied estimated incinerated souls per quadrant with number of quadrants, though he was unsure of either figure.

At that time, computers were replacing tapereels in the Archives and replacing shortwave radios of the National Security Service in tasks of absorbing suspect minds, and Mamun Ben Jaloun justified his job's murderous implications with the thought that the minds he encountered had already been deleted or submitted to jailcell blackness by the time he encountered them as thoughtreels, by saying to himself he was
just a functionary, by claiming on cloudless days that there were no minds on the thoughtreels, only impressions, ideations.

I think they are real minds, actual souls, Abd admitted one day to my father in the furnace room in full view of a blinking camera and microphone, and I think all Department employees are shit. How much did Mamun Ben Jaloun know about the Department's overhaul and translation of the whole enterprise of surveilling and storing human minds by newer machines.

All around my father, the same fires burned in all the quadrants of the Archives: magnetic and actual fires burned as Archives employees followed orders, doused themselves with Department cologne before exiting the compound to bathe against tongues of light fire dance and smoke seeping for hours into clothes, leaving porcine or human flesh smells.

Fire in the unnameable country: what happened to the thoughtreels. All through the night, nights in a row, for days dragged weeks fits and starts until entire tombstone truckloads, load-bearing vehicles finally delivered clean, erased tapereels, forklifted metal receptacles to
The Mirror
's warehouse storehouse. Fuck: as if they could hide the lugubrious odour, the Director sighed, making rounds of the inventory and giving the day's recording tapes a good inhale.

Ever the skeptic, Abd's surety only increased my father's doubts of actual minds on the thoughtreels though the question nagged and lingered and led him to follow whims of a secret compass whose bearings only pointed nightmare. One day, Mamun Ben Jaloun wanted to turn back except he could not decide whether behind him extended the path he had followed or what way lay ahead. Around him rested broken compartments of shelves, sinews of magnetic tapes exposed to the environment, the memories of dead smells dead thoughts, flashes of light and crimson dark, as well as other evidence of shipwreck and ruin. But it was not like the old days when one could not expect to find
anyone in the labyrinth, Archives employees were always collecting reels, so he yelled hello. The echo reverberated for centuries, redoubling every few seconds and coming back and back again as a louder cry than the one he had sent out, until he became confused as to whether what he heard was his own voice or another's. When, long after, it grew silent again, he heard the stirring.

He saw a man shake his head and rise from the ashes and filth, his legs bowed and his body covered profusely with hair. The stranger babbled for a long time, incomprehensible, before finally managing to spit out, Who are you very angry, it seemed, to have been disturbed.

My father, discomfited by the other's presence, explained himself and hoped to avoid a conflict. He explained with his hands outstretched, gesturing in the energetic way to which he had grown accustomed from spending so much time with Xasan Sierra and the smoking-shop crowd.

I can pluck them for you, the stranger spoke clearly, saying he knew precisely where were the reels my father was searching for, if you allow me to ride on your shoulders, since, as you can see, he pointed to his bowed legs, I am not entirely ambulant.

And before Mamun M could consider the strange offer, the man raced around behind him, leapt nimbly simian up his back, and seated himself on his shoulders.

What in the, my father tried to unbalance the trespasser and stepped this way and that, but the greater his efforts the more the vagabond increased his weight and enwrapped his legs around Mamun's neck and shoulders, while letting fly shrieks of perverse pleasure.

The pressure was so great Mamun M felt colours throughout his body flowing from other corners of the universe and just when he thought the pain could get no worse the hairy man's fists thumped against the sides of his head and he heard such loud shouts of joy that it returned him to a functional state and invoked in Mamun M the greatest desire to inflict physical pain on his assailant, a desire he had
never before experienced. But all his attempts would be set against him as, exhausted by his efforts, my father dropped to the floor, which only allowed the vagabond's feet to wrap around him even tighter.

Mamun awoke to the hairy stranger's shouts and his tugging on his ears, Get up, onward yaa. Some transformation seemed to have occurred, and as if under a spell, my father slowly rose and began galloping through the wilderness of that subterranean maze, turning and accelerating, whoa there, avoiding debris and volleying over obstacles strewn across their path until they arrived in a place where the ground shifted with every step and everything, including the weak light that drizzled onto them from above, was suffused with a dampness. By now, my father had grown somewhat accustomed to the stranger's weight and the dampness penetrated through clothing through skin, and the air was sad because it reminded him of the times he and Shukriah would attract crustaceans of the Gulf of Eden with the humidity of their lovemaking. My father snorted like a horse and tried to keep his balance on the shifty ground as the hairy man directed him to a spot where the spines of the shelves had not yet dissolved, and, one by one, he began to toss the correct roundmetal containers to the floor.

It was impossible to remove the vagabond from Mamun's shoulders. He had the property of screaming in several languages and hissing in a dangerous way whenever he felt threatened, or to asphyxiate Mamun by pressing against my father's neck with his thighs. Supervisor had no time to consider yet another medical claim from a man who had extended his last one for nearly three thousand days, and by then, Gita, Shukriah, and Chaya were so busy with the hosiery shop that they thought of Mamun's problem as purely a social accident, the result of a petty conflict between him and one of the tatterdemalion vagabonds of
the cigarette shop. At dinner, they provided the stranger his own plate of food, which he took in his raised seat, and he would apologize when he spilled the contents onto my father's head while eating.

Since Mamun M could not stand the wretched odour of the man-sized parasite, he was forced to bathe him, and I will not try to relate the acrobatic difficulties of going to toilet for two. While it is true that since the year of the sleeping plague no one in the unnameable country had fornicated, the utter lack of privacy and inability even to lie down next to Shukriah at night was an added reason for his despair. In the evenings, while my father tried desperately to read the paper or to pass the time in some other idle silent way—since he was ashamed of his condition and no longer visited his friends at Xasan Sierra's—the bow-legged stranger would babble endlessly, and switched between languages so often that only Hedayat had the patience and the time to sit at their feet and listen.

At that time, because my father thought I would be able somehow through my silence-strangespeech to pry the unseemly weight off his shoulders, he tried to understand me a little, even to get to know Niramish. My friend, meanwhile, had begun to gain the added problem of adolescent sweat glands on top of the odour of curried vegetables for which he was universally known, but even he felt sated by the knowledge that Mamun M's difficulties outweighed most people's. And he who had been laughed at all his life could not help giggling at that odd sight of a hairy man picking nits off the head of a perfect image of gentility/ middle-aged father starched collar rolled sleeves, reading.

Ask him, baba, Mamun would insist, and I would try, but to zero avail. For months I was incapable of coaxing the minotaur to reveal his history, where from you are, why in the labyrinth, and so forth. We have noticed that the hairy stranger is no Caliban and can speak perfectly comprehensible phrases, so why the roundabout and foreign. Another way to ask: glossolalia: what provokes it. Another still: does it always
work. As we have witnessed, its origin is usually the confluence of several hidden organs, historical individual spontaneous illogical-unusual to name a few. How came this stranger to possess this strange ability, and why the unnameable country. Does this trick of the tongue exist elsewhere in the world, I mean. Since it would be many months until the days of the Ranas, Q and Masoud, linked to whose life stories Hedayat's own glossolalist abilities would mature, cajoling the stranger off my father's back would have to take another route.

At that time, my friend and I were too busy wandering alleys glass bottle or cataract marijuana gaze, watching crowd actors in one camera shot or another in our city-turned-movie-set, snickering young boots, kicking dust at all their shit. I must note that I have never seen a single moment of
The Mirror
because they were manufactured for export but I know its various feature-length scenes have been shown at film festivals around the world and become hit Hollywood action flicks. Through my conversations with Niramish, I was developing my own understanding of the movie studio whose presence had increased exponentially since my father's youth. Meanwhile, the glossolalist stranger remained affixed to my father's shoulders.

My grandmother mother aunt were too busy running a business which by then was blossoming: they couldn't take down the clothes they put up on the racks fast enough to sell, to customers who now not only came from around the city but from throughout the country. Chaya had begun to design her own line of trousers-shirts; with a keen eye for style, she would grow to influence a generation of designers. Except know this: at the end of the day, when they looked in the cash register, there would be nothing but a few crumpled bills and small change. At first they cried thief, but who could have, it was only they three who ran things, and the air of mutual suspicion that was created only served to ensure that none of them were responsible. They updated books three times a day, and the figures never lied: despite having moved more
stock than ever, they were hemorrhaging capital at a rate that would put them out of business very soon. But it was like that all over the unnameable country: no matter how hard people tried to make a living, they found themselves sucked bloodless, as if a mysterious source were filling its coffers with their hardearned.

THE
ANNUNCIATION OF NIRAMISH

At that time, many things were beginning to reveal their secret characters. A team of American archaeologists and geographers, who had come with the first staff of
The Mirror
, had spent a decade and a half wandering the hinterland plains, penned between the Karkaars, an invisible southern border, and the Gulf of Eden by a swarming dustbowl, which did not give them a moment's respite and followed them everywhere they turned, one morning stumbled upon a bubbling alcove of ash, where the air unexpectedly cleared. Anthony Sentinel, the leader of the group, later said he had seen a photograph of hell exactly like it in an encyclopedia series he used to look at as a child, and the measurements they took with their instruments, which had not suffered despite all the years of dusty wandering, confirmed it was an asphalt bay almost as ancient as the earth itself. Within it, they found strange flagellant insects and amino acid series that existed nowhere else on the planet, not to mention microorganisms that were subsisting on heavy metals and toxic chemicals.

I am inclined to believe, Sentinel reported to the BBC, that the unnameable country still contains traces of the globe at its youngest stage, and is therefore the oldest country on earth, though his comments did not result in an upgrade of our observer status in the United Nations. It is important to note the crewmen came back to America and found that no trace of their lives remained the same; several of them committed suicide.