Fire in the Unnameable Country (51 page)

On my shoulder, Q cried in a forest near the Halfway House after the incident.

Let's go, Hedayat.

Where, my love, I asked, recalling she had chosen to stay in the unnameable country for whose sake but mine years earlier after scoring the American dream in a lottery ticket. I remembered the holographic gleam of big-city lights on paper and wondered would she go today without me.

Anywhere, let's get out of this country.

We don't have passports, I searched for an appropriate counter, and we wouldn't get far with what I've got, I revealed my modest acorn stash for the first time. She was heartened by my efforts, my presence of mind, my lucidity, and that I would continue trying to convince her.

And Masoud, I asked.

We'll drag my brother black vomiting onto the plane. He doesn't know what a persuasive bitch his sister can be.

But the determination of the moment faded, because time in the
Palisades is a gyre. Because time is illmatic in the Palisades, which means the same lines on the same foreheads and same palms repeat across generations. A hot wind blows in the Palisades. Who killed Morris the cop, scream the headlines, Morris, Peaceable Policeman, whose life unnecessarily taken by a Warren rat. The Governor has taken the death of Morris the cop to mean an opportunity for a massive fly-swatting campaign. It signed the fire papers before he did.

Bullets fly miraculously. Three neighbourhood shops, several houses, an apartment complex, a pharmacy, the local doctor's office spontaneously combust. Six weeks later, the very day the UN Council on Internal Relations of the Unnameable Country delivers a report on the situation at the General Assembly, Claus Claude Van Damme, son of the action superstar Jean-Claude, fly-kicks a sugar-screen oriel window's ass in an action sequence for
The Mirror
that to film requires the closure of a well whose drinking water is key for Palisades residents. The UN report, by the way, lists the number of disappeared or dead in the retaliatory campaign to be as high as six hundred, but numbers speak as well as corpses. Finally, scholars scouring La Maga police records from that time never discover the existence of such a character as Morris the cop. Nevertheless, all the fieldmice of the Palisades scatter across the flathouses and through the fire-streets, but we can call them cats or dogs or snakes or rats if we like. Whatever the term, lead is indiscriminate.

The matter reached a head during a Die for Peace theatre assembly, a monumental act of civil disobedience: over one hundred thousand grandmotherschildrenwomenmenyoungandold lay down on the busiest highways in the unnameable country, spaced lengthwise head to toe for one hundred miles with white sheets placed over their bodies, corpses for a day. General Morganson, commander-in-chief and direct descendant of Admiral Mulligan, called in the tanks. What exactly occurred next is contested, though the available footage speaks clearly. The army claims public mischief and potential threat of terrorism
prompted the retaliation, but one thing is clear: for a long time, no one moved, as if already/ they were screaming they're killing us killing us, and the tanks began trampling unarmed bodies the horror.

Several days later, the first suicide attack in the unnameable country: a young woman equipped with a semi-automatic and half-dozen clips entered the head office of Barclays, the first British bank to settle in the unnameable country. She bulleted twenty employees, waited until the feds gathered below, took the elevator down, and with arms upheld in a deferential pose of surrender she walked outside to the awaiting militarymen and shit, in her hand, a copper screamed but too late. A hot wind overturned Jeeps and police cruisers and scorched fourteen soldiers. Of her body, there remained a few charred organs.

Today in the Palisades they are doing it not just with the military police but also with the ambulance worker, who after taking your son's pulse shows you his red card, offside, sir. They search and sniff all your pockets and belongings while barbs nettles in your lungs and your silence, sheared voice/

Or they might insist you hurry, you, the young woman, while they poke through your underwear drawer as you bite your lips. Won't find anything there, you say, while your mother stands tearing from the eyes, pleading for an exchange, meinsteadofshewouldbefrightened.

You would be frightened too, the handsome officer replies in even syllables, and for a moment the mother reconsiders, whowouldn't, as another actual dog pushes in with front paws and on hind legs, out of the way, he says, talking language barking sniffing ravenously under bedsheets, he smells something. Terror and shame as they thumb through your bookshelf, underwear drawer, intimate thoughts. They read the pages and they watch. Hurry, they insist, and push you doors open into a car you don't say a word. Not a word as they lead you among the trees marking graves.

Black Organs generally pump harder through hidden arteries
of the unnameable country after catastrophe, accusing haranguing capturing bodies for blame and reprimand for spontaneous fires. The recently appointed government of our nation featured representatives of large defence contractors, an American general, and the head of the largest spidersilk corporation in the world, Joshimuddin Khan Jr., son of Nasiruddin Khan; it imposed curfews, thumbprint identification and payment devices that allowed you to pass checkpoints if your records were clear, if you were allowed, and let you make purchases at gas stations and department stores simply by scanning your hands, revealed intimate details of your life and body to Black Organs. They heightened army and paramilitary governance of the streets and people's homes, where they set up stations as they did to monitor my father Mamun Ben Jaloun, making our home into hell for many years.

What kept me owl-eyed, focused on understanding our country's unnameable past, was Q, who told me once upon a time before she left we have never been a nation, Hedayat, we have never been ourselves. I don't understand. We are the world, she said. What do you mean. Sometimes I forget our name, she shrugged.

For her sake, though she had never spoken of children of her own, because I had never seen her happier, I was glad when there emerged a living child among the ghosts, one with a shell in his hand. He walked right up to Q as if he knew her, the child with coal-bright eyes who never releases his grip on his backward shell.

THE
BOY WITH THE BACKWARD
CONCH

When the boy with the backward conch came to the Hospice, everything changed because the damp ash smoke of a hundred apparitions trailed behind him. We couldn't figure out why until Masoud told us he had read in newspapers that spontaneous fires fall on spiderfields, on village residents. It's as if an asteroid fucked the hinterland, Masoud said about pictures of a moonscape. Where did it happen. Benediction, he showed me the page. Shit, I looked at the photo. Q, who subscribed to a magazine called
Unnameable Earth
, relayed that it was the largest spontaneous fire recorded in years, and showed us another shot of the region high above the city's corolla tossing petals three-sixty, all plant animal machine become one flower. The number of reported dead increased daily after that while thousands of ghosts wandered bloodhungry, wailed Re-Employment Office corridors seeking recognition rebirth remuneration for their losses.

That a hundred of them eventually made it to the Hospice surprised us, we expected more, would have welcomed all of them, obviously, but with apprehensions about enough blood. Something
was happening: our facility, which had originally been constructed to care for the dying dead before they disappeared from even a faded existence, was becoming a treatment centre for ghosts that wanted to rejoin the world of the living. Benediction's spontaneous massacre was proving to Q that we were like a United Nations workspace, understaffed, underfunded. As with the multiplying walls and ceiling for sky that now characterized our ensconced unnameable country, she began to become agitated, frustrated. I will stay here and build it nevertheless, I said of the Hospice, because it was respite for me, outside all the shit in my mind. Q didn't reply.

Fire. We know you. Ever since I can remember, since an ill-gotten, forgotten time long before my birth, fire has been the motif of the unnameable country, exploding hospitals to hell, schools, buildings, machines building machines all collapse and catafalque, gravebound spontaneously without warning.

We had never had to deal with such a large party of undead. They were so translucent we could direct all of them to a single room where their mouths moved soundless, and their faces emerged chest legs torso for mere moments one hundred pale screams. These were ghosts that huddled together, a hundred of them, according to newspaper numbers, in a room, stunned. Like the boy, they didn't speak.

Like them, he blinked his answers to our questions. We had encountered such spectral tap tap shit, such dit-dahed rise from grave into world another visit, but they had belonged to Chance Game victims who once upon a time had bet more than gallbladders, appendixes, liver sections, or single-centimetre patches of skin removed. We had watched how with their eyes the lottery ghosts reiterated the alphanumeric combinations of tickets they had received accidentally, bought and wagered, had traded for, the pathways from lottery bet to acquired housing debt to lottery-directed removed organs from those whose homes had been destroyed by spontaneous fires, as Hedayat
learned from a ghost who in his life had bled to death during a requisite midsection operation and awakened Re-Alphabet in the morgue, speaking the language of his lottery demise ticket number by ticket bloody number, blinking Re-Alphabet for all time thereafter. But the boy and his ghosts were subjects of spontaneous fires, reports of which made peripheral mention on occasion of the hornet hum and unidentifiable aerial motion over a spidersilk region before a blanket of fire but never the direct causes of sound and heat and light.

Suddenly, we had to take care of one hundred more ghosts and the boy. We didn't know what to do with them at first, but as for the boy, a glow came over Q as soon as she saw him, all love as she was, and he immediately nestled in her crook, hardly whimpering, never for a moment relinquishing the backward shell he held close like a disembodied organ, which he would place at his ear, pause, before turning around to exchange rapid blinks with the ghosts that followed him constantly. Who was the boy with the backward conch and what do they say of the boy.

Recall, if you can, the time of street water that followed, which was a new thing, a Director's choice, a thing belonging to an imbroglio whose image we had no idea of, so mysterious was he, and who had a handle on all four elements of the periodic table. While we worked, Masoud would tune a transistor radio high volume to an international news station that described how the Director had recently placed enormous heating rods in the Gulf of Eden to create dense humid updraughts for a storm scene of
The Mirror
; brine collected into cumulus clouds rich with sea fauna. It rained crustaceans in La Maga; schools of albula and barracuda fell from the sky as did pipefish with red posterior lateral lines, which splashed in neighbourhood waters alongside shrimp, crayfish, mussels, lockets belonging to maidens prior to their mermaid transformations, which they had taken with them into deep waters. The wheels and gears of heavy industrial machinery splash-landed. Household and
industrial waste seeped into new swimming areas, while hammerhead sharks swam outside our doors with eels that opened demonic mouths containing more incisors than one hundred healthy full-grown men. As the rains grew heavier, trucks got stuck and had to climb out of the mud on long flat rectangles of wood placed before their wheels. The streets flooded up to ankles to knees to thighs in some neighbourhoods, and children waded in between cars, netting, spearing, basketing enough live seafood for weeks of roasted fried boiled marine meals served with rice with lentils with couscous and vegetables.

On Monday, Hedayat waded in the streets and speared minnow with the boy, who carried his conch with him, of course, for the expedition. Tuesday Wednesday featured sardines, and on Thursday they were eating manta meat that Q grilled butane gas cookery, simmered to juice every bite. I gambolled word to word to evoke him speak but my glossolalia yielded no response. Meanwhile, the other room blinked a sea of switches, hundreds of eyes frozen masks moving eyes.

There were human mouths and ghost mouths to feed. Hedayat speared cuttlefish and koi in the streetwater and tried to include the kid in these activities but he wouldn't leave Q's nest, her crook of arm, her lap.

Does he speak to you, I asked her.

No.

Does he laugh.

He howls.

Who was the boy with the backward conch, and what do they say of the boy.

Why did the ghosts follow him here, I wondered aloud. How the hell do we feed them, I asked her look, pointed at them flickering lightnightflash, starving. Food, I paced the Hospice, right index at chin, but these were such unordinary apparitions; our ghost encounters were usually with flesh and bloodless types, the dead but still visible, and
these creatures couldn't handle intravenous or eats, so far as we could tell. It was Q who figured it first, let's try, she said when I asked her bustling room to room what are you doing. Sublimation, she replied finally, and handed Masoud, the boy, and me surgical masks and goggles from the equipment room before melting a solid ice blood pack from the fridge with steam machine, vaporizing red gas. A purr and rumble through the Hospice when the ghosts breathed their fill.