Orpheus Lost (24 page)

“Have I?” Leela said. “Well, I suppose it’s because of the way you followed me down into the subway last week. I keep
half-believing Mishka will reappear there and when you tapped me on the shoulder, I had this mad hope…”

Berg frowned. He laid her wrists down in front of her, neatly, one on top of the other, and released them.

“And you were out of breath,” Leela said, “so I knew you’d run after me and that was so…”

Indeed, Berg thought. So unexpected. So unwise.

She had burst into tears and he had instinctively put his arms around her. She had sobbed on his shoulder and he had buried his face in her hair.

“You must have thought I was a lunatic,” she said.

“Not at all. You were clearly in shock. You needed to talk.”

“Did I talk very much?”

“For hours, but you didn’t always make sense.”

“Can I just go back to the idea for the moment, for the sake of argument, that Mishka is making contact with me through dreams—”

Berg sighed. “You’re
stuck
, you know. Whatever happened, you’re stuck there. You go over and over the same fragment like a cracked record and I think you’ve got to try to dislodge yourself. So I’m going to say something brutal: the chances of psychic contact are just about zero because you never really knew the man. I mean, you had to stalk him to find out he was going to that mosque.”

“I shouldn’t have done that. I should have trusted him.”

“Look, I admit I’m prejudiced. I have a low opinion of someone who hangs around with thugs who send me hate mail.”

“Is that still happening?”

“No, thank God. But then the probable instigator blew himself up, didn’t he?”

Leela turned and turned a coaster in her hands. She began tearing it, carefully, precisely, purposefully, in a spiral. “I’m making a strange loop,” she said. “In math, we accept strange loops.”

“You’re code-switching. Invalid analogy.”

“We accept conclusions that don’t make sense. I’m in a strange underground loop with Orpheus.”

“Orpheus. Right.”

“I mean Mishka. He’s a musician. He’s gone into the underworld and hasn’t come back. It’s not supposed to happen that way.”

Berg looked away. He had to be careful. He did not want her to disappear. “Orpheus in the underworld,” he repeated, neutral. What was it with mathematicians? Did it help to be crazy? From Newton onwards, a case could be made.

Could he seriously consider himself unscathed?

“I’m the one who’s been trying to rescue him,” Leela said. “It’s supposed to be the other way around.”

Berg wanted to shake her. He kept his eyes on the torn coaster in her hands. “Don’t you think this fixation on an underworld might be something you need to know about yourself?”

“What I know about myself,” Leela said slowly, “is that I know very little, and I think very little can ever be known with certainty, and I am frightened.”

Berg ignored all the warnings then. He leaned across the table and held her face in his hands. “It will be all right,” he said. “Whatever’s happened, it will be all right. This is temporary. It’s shock, it won’t last.”

“What I’m frightened of,” Leela said, “is the glass wall in my dream. I’m frightened of what it means.”

“These things pass,” Berg promised, “they pass. And I’ve got boring but simple advice. Start coming in to your office. Start looking over work you’ve already done. Start
doing
, instead of brooding. I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been where you are now, after my marriage broke up. And no matter what happens, life goes on.”

T
HE VOICEMAIL ON
Leela’s office phone at MIT was full. Every single message was from Siddiqi.
Your music has arrived
, the messages said. Leela played all the messages back and then she went to a pay phone and called the Music Department in Paine Hall.

“When can I pick up my music?” she asked.

“It’s been here for weeks,” Siddiqi said. “Where have you been?”

“I could ask you that.”

“Better if you don’t. You can pick up your music at two.”

“So I’m drifting,” Leela explained.

“I’ve been back a few weeks, but I’m a mess. I haven’t been going to my office. I can’t concentrate. I can’t even read. I have bad dreams. I keep thinking I see Mishka. I make a fool of myself running after people and tapping them on the shoulder. When they turn around, they don’t look like him at all.”

“Grief’s a wild animal,” Youssef Siddiqi said. “So is fear. If you tremble and cringe, those two will tear you apart. You have to ride them.”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“I hope so. I’ve put it behind me. I was picked up, I was let go, it’s done with. That’s not what I want to talk about.”

“But I do. How long were you held?”

“A few weeks.”

“You had a lawyer?”

“Eventually.”

“Not at first?”

“No. But then I got one, and then I got out. And here I am.”

“You’re a citizen. This isn’t supposed to happen.”

“My lawyer’s handling that. I was afraid I’d be picked up again after the Chicago incident, but I wasn’t.”

“Aren’t you outraged?”

“I was,” Siddiqi said. “But rage is like picking up a burning coal to throw at someone. You’re the one who gets hurt. And the good news is that the mosque has issued a statement, did you see? Haddad’s been condemned as un-Islamic. So things are improving and Muslim moderates are speaking up.”

“But Mishka,” Leela said, anguished. “What about Mishka?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking myself. What can we do? What can I do, as an American and a Muslim and a musician? And I came up with something, but I’ll need your help.”

“I’m listening.”

“Michael composed a piece called
Elegy for Uncle Otto and Mustafa Hajj
.”

“Yes.”

“We played it one afternoon, Michael on violin, myself on the oud. It was after a class when we both got badly rattled by Haddad, who had a pathological hatred of music.”

“I never met Jamil Haddad. I’d never even heard of him before the bombing.”

“Jamil was a walking time bomb. I’ve never known anyone more angry. Michael and I talked for hours about what hatred of music means, and we decided it’s an inverse compliment to
music’s power. Michael talked about Mr. Hajj and Uncle Otto, and he went to his office and got the score of his
Elegy
and we played it.”

Leela could picture this: she could see Mishka, his eyes closed, his body an extension of his violin. She could imagine Youssef Siddiqi and his oud.

“This was more than a month before the bombing,” Siddiqi said. “It was one of the things I kept thinking about. When I was being interrogated, I mean. It was one of the ways I got by. I passed the time trying to remember the whole piece. I was playing it mentally. And suddenly the thought hit me that we always have tapes running in the practice room. So after I was released, that’s the first thing I did. I hunted back through the files and I found our performance. I made copies. Here’s one for you.”

Leela held the cassette between her hands as though it offered the chance to rewind time.

“And then I got another idea,” Siddiqi said.

He was excited. Leela sensed his excitement as something exotic and strange, like a moon landing, a rare and impressive achievement but light years beyond her reach.

“The music department’s got copies of some of his compositions,” Siddiqi said. “And you must have others at your place. We could have faculty and students perform his work. We could have a concert in Sanders Theater:
Elegy for Michael Bartok
.”

“
Elegy!
” Leela said, alarmed.

Youssef reached across the table and laid his hand over Leela’s and Leela saw Mishka as she kept on seeing him in dreams: on the other side of a glass wall.
On the other side
, she thought. She could imagine herself performing in the subway, a slightly deranged woman with a hat at her feet who was always singing
a capella
:
Che farò senza Mishka Bartok?

“
Homage
,” Youssef corrected himself. “
Homage to Michael Bartok.
Sorry. I was picking up on the title of his piece.”

Leela said flatly: “You think he’s dead.”

Youssef sighed. “I don’t think that. We can’t know, can we?” He began chafing Leela’s hands, as though she were a blizzard victim who needed warmth. “There’s one thing we can be certain of: his music is alive.”

All Leela could hear, however, was the slow beat of a drum and the notes, in a minor key, of an elegy.

I
N LEELA’S APARTMENT,
there was a message on the answering machine: two full minutes of silence.

Leela played the message over and over. She thought the silence sounded like Cobb. From the back of her wallet, she pulled the old photograph, dog-eared, taken years ago, a lifetime ago, on the day of the Math Prize in high school.

She pressed the photograph to her lips.

She slipped a tape into the cassette deck. It was the tape that Youssef Siddiqi had made. She turned off the lights. She closed her eyes. She imagined Mishka standing by the window, the tree behind him, the neon aura backlighting the tree. She could see him clearly through her closed lids. When the warm sound of his violin and of Youssef’s oud filled the room, she said aloud, “I knew I was right about Cobb.”

Mishka lowered his violin and met her eyes. What makes you think you can trust him? he wanted to know.

“Because I know him better than he knows himself. I always have.”

The telephone rang.

“You see?” she said. She watched Mishka watching her hand as it traveled toward the receiver. She watched how he moved his bow to make words float up from the strings. He played a phrase from Bach, the St. Matthew Passion:
Tell me
where you have laid him
. “He will tell,” she promised. “I know he will.” She cradled the phone against her cheek and the curve of her neck. “Cobb? I knew you’d call,” she said. “Where is he?”

“Leela?”

“…”

“Leela?”

“Who is this?”

“Leela, where have you been?”

“Is that Maggie?”

“You have to come home, Leela. Daddy’s dreadfully ill. The doctor says it’s a matter of weeks.”

C
OBB HAD NEVER
seen such a labyrinth.

“How far beneath Baghdad does this extend?” he asked.

“We don’t know,” the warden said. “There are corridors we can’t use because they’ve caved in. We think we lost some detainees that way.”

“What do you mean, you
think
you lost some? Aren’t you keeping records?”

“Not for these ones. We used to. We had orders to shred.” The warden paused at an intersection. He shone his flashlight down the tunnel ahead—no end was in sight—and then down the cross tunnels, which were extremely narrow, more like sewers than walkways. The floors were damp. The walls wept slime. There was a dank smell of mold which triggered a breathing crisis for the warden. He pulled an inhaler from his pocket and closed his mouth over it and pumped. “Happens every time,” he gasped, raking air into his lungs. “Just give me a minute.”

Cobb’s eyes were adjusting. He could now see the small barred openings, one foot square, that at intervals gave onto darkness.

“I’m okay now,” the warden said. “Let’s go. I hate coming down here.”

Moans could be heard, and furtive rustlings. The warden pointed his flashlight at the sounds. “Damned rats,” he said.
“We’ve tried everything.” The beam of light fell on a white arrow crudely brush-stroked on the wall. “It’s down this way.”

“How can you tell?”

“We painted those signs. Got lost once when my battery gave out.” He clicked the off-switch to demonstrate.

“Shit,” Cobb said. “It’s black as pitch. What’d you do?”

“Had a panic attack. Yelled until relief guards came but they thought I was a prisoner gone berserk and did the ice water thing. I thought I’d had it.” He groped for Cobb’s hand and pushed it against the battery pack in his jacket. “Feel that? Now I always carry a spare.”

“How about switching your flashlight back on?”

The warden laughed. “Sure. Notice how quiet it is? It’s like they turn into spiders, watching us. After a while, they see in the dark.”

Cobb studied the small barred openings just visible beyond the glow of the warden’s torch. He could see nothing. There was nothing behind the black holes. Then he thought there was. He thought he saw eyes, burning bright like the eyes of cats. He began to see them all around him, moving like paired fireflies in the dark.

“They’re watching us,” the warden said. “Their hearing gets more acute too. You wouldn’t believe how many claim they can tell a spider from an ant.”

“How many detainees have you got here?”

“No idea.”

“They’re all ghosts?”

“All ghosts, and we get new ones every day.”

“Where do you find the space?”

“Revolving door. It’s musical cells because most of them get released. Eventually.”

“How long is
eventually
?”

“Could be a few days or a month. Depends on interrogation. That’s the beauty of ghosting. If we registered them, we couldn’t just let them go.”

“And you’d run out of space.”

“Hard to know, to tell you the truth. There’s miles of cells we’ve never used. We think Saddam left people here who’ve never been found. We do have maps. We found them on parchment in a section the archaeologists say was a library.”

“Was this the sewer system?”

“Hell no. That’s a few centuries lower down. This wasn’t built underground. This
was
the city before one of those floods, tenth century, fourth century, I can’t remember which. We have to let the archaeologists poke around—it’s part of the deal—and they tell us this stuff. Apparently they’ve lost count of the number of times the river flooded and the number of times the city’s been rebuilt on top of the mud. We’re walking on an ancient street. Here’s the cell.”

“Wait,” Cobb said. “Who’s in charge of interrogation?”

“Can’t answer that. Beyond my scope. We’re private, see. We won the contract. We just manage the place.”

“For whom?”

“For whoever. Iraqi militia, army, NSA, CIA, interpreters, interrogation squads, they all come and go.”

“Who’s on these interrogation squads?”

“Who knows? They wear masks. I get the transcripts and I’m responsible for passing them on.”

“Passing them on to whom?”

“Sometimes a courier picks them up.”

“And you’re permitted to read them?”

“Not officially, but I run a little sideline in copies, as you know. It’s how I learned this is your boy. Speaking of which—”

“You’ll get the rest of your money.”

“I have to warn you, your boy’s a weird one. He hums a lot. Sometimes he sings.”

“Was there any intelligence at all?”

“They couldn’t shut him up. But you know that. I already gave you the transcript.”

“You call that intelligence?”

“Hey, I warned you. But who asks me? The squads say they get what they need but you have to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

“The transcript was babble. Oud makers, oud teachers, violin techniques…”

“Code names, the analysts say. They’re working on it.”

“Working on it?”

“Deciphering.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“They think he might be talking strategy. Violin
techniques
, get it? That’s what the analysts say. Booby-trapping musical instruments. The squad told him they got that much from his father. He pretty much went crazy and confessed.”

“There’s nothing about that in the transcript.”

“The squads don’t tape Level 3 interrogation. They make an oral report.”

“You said most ghosts get cleared and released.”

“Not this one. Too valuable as leverage with the father. Sorry I can’t leave the flashlight but we’re short of equipment. Here’s a candle and matches.”

“Hey, wait!” Cobb said, but the warden was gone. He turned a corner and extinguished himself.

Cobb had not felt the dark as something so alive and malevolent and soft-fingered since the night when his mother died. He heard humming and stood transfixed. Trembling, he tried to strike a match. Something thumped against him, almost
knocking him over, something soft and bulky and large. He tore another cardboard match from the pack and struck it. As it flared, the body hit him again like the clapper of a bell.

“Oh Jesus,” Cobb whispered. He held the match higher.

“What the fuck have these idiots done?”