Alif the Unseen (20 page)

There was another pause. Alif heard shuffling feet.

“Is that
music
?” came the fat voice.

“And if it is?”

“Music in a
mosque
?”

“How convenient that you have suddenly found your piety,” the sheikh snapped. “Basheera has been under my care for longer than you’ve been alive and I’ve never had
any complaints. Now, I’ve told you the prayer hall is closed and my eyes are failing. Clearly I can be of no help to you. I hope you find whoever it is you’re looking for.”

“If we don’t, we’re coming back with a warrant from Religious Oversight,” said the fat voice. “And God help you then.”

“He often does,” said the sheikh.

The doors rumbled shut. Alif slid to the floor with his back against the arch, realizing how dangerously close he had come to soiling himself. It was over now. He wiped his sweating,
tear-streaked face on the hem of his T-shirt. The sheikh walked swiftly toward him across the faded carpet of the
musala,
bending once with a sigh to examine a clod of dirt left behind by
Alif’s shoe.

“Your path of destruction will need to be scrubbed,” he said as he reached the far end. “I hope I can count on you to volunteer.”

“Of course,” said Alif. “Anything.”

The sheikh peered down at Alif through his milky eyes.

“You’re just a boy!” he exclaimed. “Or barely a man, at any rate. What have you done that’s got State security so worked up? Are you a terrorist?”

“I’m a computer programmer. I help—I help whoever asks me.”

“Meaning the Islamists?”

Alif let his head drop miserably to his knees.

“Islamists, anarchists, secularists—whoever asks.”

“God have mercy upon us. A man of principle. My name is Bilal—Sheikh Bilal, they call me. Don’t tell me your name, it’s better I not know. Come into my office—you
need a wash and a cup of tea.”

* * *

The sheikh’s office was an old stone room off the
musala
with a wooden-latticed window that looked onto a courtyard. A roll-top desk stood against one wall, piled
high with books and forms and loose paper clips. It was called the Morocco Room, the sheikh said, because in the old days madrassa students from North Africa gathered there to listen to lectures in
their own dialect. After Alif stowed his backpack in a corner the sheikh showed him to a small washroom down a corridor.

“Make sure to wash your feet!” he said, handing Alif a towel. “Use the lower tap, that’s what it’s there for. Do you take sugar? I make tea the Egyptian way: dark,
with mint. None of this womanish milk chai you
desis
brought with you. I’ll wait for you down the hall.”

He turned, gathering his robes about him, and went back toward the office. Alif rolled up the cuffs of his pants and turned on the tap, letting tepid water gush over his hot feet. It was so
pleasant that he stripped bare and performed a sketchy wash of his entire body, watching the accumulated dust of the past two days run off his skin in rivulets. He pressed his forehead against the
dingy tile wall. There was a fresco of octagonal stars picked out in green at eye level—an institutional mosque design, ordinary, reassuring. He allowed himself to feel safe. Strains of the
sheikh’s violin recording echoed from the corners of the washroom, growing louder or softer depending on how Alif turned his head to listen.

Cooler and cleaner, Alif re-dressed, carrying his shoes gingerly by two fingers as he padded barefoot down the corridor. Sheikh Bilal was in his office, measuring out spoonfuls of sugar into two
tea glasses. A tin pot let off steam as it boiled on a hot plate in the corner. Alif moved a stack of newspapers off a chair near the sheikh’s desk and sat down.

“There! Much better.” The sheikh handed Alif a glass of dark red tea in which a sprig of mint was steeping. “You look less like a ruffian and more like what you claim to be. I
thought you might be trying to fool an old man into letting you rob the joint.”

“I’m not a thief,” said Alif.

“I believe you. But what made you come here of all places? Surely it would have been wiser to find a good lawyer.”

Alif laughed soundlessly. “I’m past needing a lawyer, Sheikh Uncle. I ’d be better off arranging my funeral rites. I thought—well, it’s silly.”

“Possibly so, but tell me anyway.”

“I thought there was no way they could drag me out of a mosque. Especially this mosque.”

Sheikh Bilal’s expression grew serious. He took a sip of tea, sucking the liquid between his teeth before swallowing.

“There was a point in history when you might have been right about that,” he said. “But not now.” His eyes wandered to the wood-latticed window. Strong sunlight cast a
woven shadow across the floor and the hem of his robe.

“For many centuries the emirs answered to us, you see,” he continued. “ To the
ulema
of Al Basheera. Back then the protection of this mosque would have meant
something. We ran the university and acted as judges for the common folk—during the Middle Ages they say we even ran a well-respected bank. Credit, my boy! Invented by the Arabs.”

“I’m half Arab,” said Alif, irritated.

“Oh?” Sheikh Bilal blinked at him. “Yes, perhaps you are. At any rate. The emirs were enforcers. They protected the City, protected us, sent the young men off to war when they
got too rambunctious.”

“What happened?”

“Oil.” The sheikh shook his head. “The great cursed wealth from beneath the ground that the Prophet foresaw would destroy us. And statehood—what a terrible idea that was,
eh? This part of the world was never meant to function that way. Too many languages, too many tribes, too motivated by ideas those high-heeled cartographers from Paris couldn’t understand.
Don’t understand. Will never understand. Well, God save them—they’re not the ones who have to live in this mess. They said a modern state needs a single leader, a secular leader,
and the emir was the closest thing we had. So to the emir went all the power. And anyone who thinks that isn’t a good idea is hounded down and tossed in jail, as you have so recently
discovered. All so that some pantywaist royal nephew can have a seat at the UN and carry a flag in the Olympics and be thoroughly ignored.”

“This is treason,” said Alif with a nervous giggle.

“Don’t I know it! Never fear, I’m completely domesticated. I don’t give Friday sermons anymore, but when I did, I glossed over the latest jailed journalist or disappeared
dissident like everyone else, and prayed for the health of the emir, and the princess to boot. Yes, I know what’s good for me.” Sheikh Bilal tossed back the last of his tea and set the
glass on his desk with a loud clank.

“Now, if you’re finished, I will find you a bucket and some soap and you can get to work on the carpet.”

* * *

Sheikh Bilal sat in a chair and directed Alif as he scrubbed at his footprints with a horsehair brush, pointing out debris he had missed. Alif hadn’t realized his shoes
were so dirty. With growing mortification, he thought back to the mud and donkey shit of the Place of Trash and the well-watered soil of the little date palm grove in Baqara District. His path had
taken him across more than a dozen prayer niches printed on the wall-to-wall carpet of the
musala,
prefabricated substitutions for the hand-woven mats men once brought with them from home.
His knees quickly grew tired and damp as he worked his way backward toward the mosque’s main doors.

“I don’t see why this needs to be such a production,” he muttered, leaning into the brush. “It’s just some dirt. The people who come to pray walk through it to get
here.”

“Spiritual technology, my boy!” said Sheikh Bilal. “The dirt on your shoes is ritually unclean even if it is practically unavoidable. Ritual law is not required to make sense
to us mortals, it is enough that it makes sense to God. When you pray all your actions must fit together like gears in a great machine—like one of your computers.”

“Computers don’t have gears.”

“Don’t be obstinate. It’s not attractive in someone so young. I know you understand what I mean. Two hundred years ago, would anyone, even the most learned scientist, believe
you if you told him one day men would walk on the moon and send information through the very air? I will supply my own response:
no
. But today these are unremarkable events. Perhaps the
same is true of ritual—perhaps on the Day of Days the schematic of God’s great machine will be as obvious to you as the code in your programs.”

Alif sat down and stretched his legs.

“It’s not always like that. The reason I came running in here is because—” He paused, then elected to tell a half-truth. There was no need to bring djinn into the
equation. “I wrote a program and I don’t really understand why it works, and now the government has it.”

Sheikh Bilal leaned forward. “Now that is interesting. What does it do, this program?”

“It can tell who people are by analyzing what they type.”

“Yes, that is just the sort of thing the State would love. But there is a girl mixed up in all of this, I have no doubt. In a lovely silk veil, whose modesty does not prevent her from
using more eye makeup than several Fifi Abdous.”

Bewildered, Alif’s gaze skittered from the soapy carpet to the sheikh and back again. He wondered if the old man might be a spy, and whether the wet horsehair brush could serve him as a
weapon while he made his escape.

“Don’t look so startled. You have that sullen expression young men get when they’ve been jilted. It’s why men are meant to have beards—growing all that hair leaves
no energy for moodiness. Much more dignified.”

Alif touched the stubble on his chin doubtfully. Sheikh Bilal chuckled, folding back the sleeves of his robe and dabbing his wrists with oil from a small glass vial.

“Lotus oil? It helps in this heat. Am I right about the girl?”

“I never noticed that she used too much eye makeup,” Alif mumbled. “She looked fine to me.”

“I’m sure she did. What, did she say she wouldn’t marry you? Not enough money, apartment not big enough, and that skin—well, it is a shame you take after the
desi
side. Girls these days are a frivolous bunch.”

“It was her father,” said Alif. “He’s forcing her to marry someone else. Someone who doesn’t love her—someone who only wants to use her to increase his own
power.”

The sheikh’s expression changed. “Hmm. That may be—or it may not. In my experience, a treasured daughter can usually get her way when it comes to these things.”

“I know Intisar doesn’t want this man,” Alif said hotly. “She was crying when I last saw her, crying—”

“All right, all right.” Sheikh Bilal leaned back in his chair. “She is betrothed to this other man and breaks it off with you. What do you do next?”

Alif flicked a soap bubble with his finger. When framed so bluntly, his reaction to Intisar’s betrayal seemed hysterical, unnecessary. Why had he bothered to write Tin Sari? Why had he not
simply erased her number from his phone and deleted her e-mails? It would have been easy enough to avoid her.

“She said she never wanted to see my name again,” he said. “So I wrote this program that would identify her no matter what computer or e-mail address she might use. Then I told
my system to block her whenever it found her, and make it look like I didn’t exist.”

“And the government censors found this program, and your goose is cooked.”

“Something like that.” Alif elected not to mention the other reason for the Hand’s vendetta.

“Well, well. You have pious instincts for someone who looks like such a heathen. Not many men use the Internet for so high-handed a purpose as discretion.”

“I’m not as good as all that,” said Alif, chucking his brush back into the bucket of soapy water. “I could still see her. Online I mean. I still had access to her
machine.”

“That was very wrong of you. It is only given to women to see without being seen—men must act in the open, or not at all.”

“You’ve gone metaphysical. Can I stop scrubbing? My knees ache.”

Sheikh Bilal examined the trail of suds leading back toward his office. “No, no. You’ve got another six feet until you reach the door. If you rally your energy you could be done in
ten minutes.”

Alif slopped more water on the floor and dragged the brush in circles over another footprint.

“You don’t need to be sulky—you’ll be done before you know it. Tell me more about your work. At what point will I be able to write an e-mail to my grandson in Bahrain
merely by thinking it?”

“Thinking it?” Alif smiled contemptuously. “I expect never. Quantum computing will be the next thing, but I don’t think it will be capable of transcribing
thought.”

“Quantum? Oh dear, I’ve never heard of that.”

“It will use qubits instead of—well, that’s kind of complicated. Regular computers use a binary language to figure things out and talk to each other—ones and zeroes.
Quantum computers could use ones and zeroes in an unlimited number of states so, in theory, they could store massive amounts of data and perform tasks that regular computers can’t
perform.”

“States?”

“Positions in space and time. Ways of being.”

“Now it is you who are metaphysical. Let me rephrase what I think you have said in language from my own field of study: they say that each word in the Quran has seven thousand layers of
meaning, each of which, though some might seem contrary or simply unfathomable to us, exist equally at all times without cosmological contradiction. Is this similar to what you mean?”

Alif looked up from his work, surprised.

“Yes,” he said. “That is exactly what I mean. I’ve never heard anybody make that comparison.”

“Perhaps you’ve never put yourself in the way of hearing it. You look like the sort of boy who shirks his religious education.”

“Why does everyone keep saying that?” Making a face, Alif dunked his brush in the soapy bucket once more. “You, Vikram, Dina—”

“No names, please!” Sheikh Bilal put his hands over his ears. “If those chubby idiots from State come back here, I want them to find me in total ignorance. They are not above
taking a lighter to an old man’s ass hairs if they think it’ll make him talk.”