Submergence (23 page)

According to the Koran, Allah created angels from light, then created jinn from smokeless flame. Man was made of clay and breathed into only when the jinn disappointed Allah by climbing to the top of the sky and eavesdropping on the angels there. But Allah did drown the jinn or otherwise destroy them. He allowed them all to live in parallel, coexisting in the world.

It is possible for jinn to see men and take possession of their bodies. It is more difficult for men to see jinn; their country is oblique to ours. In certain traditions, anyone who glimpses the real face of a jinn dies of fright.

There are a few telltale signs of jinn among us. In the eyes and speech patterns, or in the feet, which are often set backwards. Jinn have a freedom of choice like man does. They can choose to believe or not, to be good or bad. ‘And among us jinn there are those who are righteous and those who are far from that. We are sects, having different rules,’ says the Koran.

The weapons against malign jinn are religious certitude and education, both of which produce a roaring of thought that the jinn cannot stand. So those jinn who choose to step into our country prefer to occupy bodies which are in a liminal state: a menstruating or pregnant woman, a lunatic, someone incoherent with anger, or a man and a woman having sex, when consciousness is a sheet of copper beaten down, mirroring only the moment.

The serpent in the Garden of Eden is said to be a shape-shifting jinn. They are blamed for the manias of the night. There is no agreement among Muslim clerics on whether jinn are physical or subtle. Some clerical accounts have them as giant and hideously ursine, with matted hair, long yellow teeth; they are the abominable snowmen of the Hindu Kush and the Himalaya. This kind of jinn can be slain with plum pips or other fruit stones fired from a sling. Scholarly clerics prefer to describe jinn as an energy, perhaps a pulse responsive to the laws of physics, which are alive at the margins of sleep or madness, and expand themselves into other semiconscious states of existence. An extension of this thinking is that jinn are the continuance of thoughts that were in the world before man.

He was no closer to Saif. He did not care for the man’s gap teeth, his outbursts, and he was determined also to avoid any suggestion of Stockholm syndrome, in which the captive develops an affection for his captor. Yet when they cooked legs of mutton, it was Saif who made sure he ate, and gave him tea. It was Saif who came and spoke to him.
They sat together and looked out over Somalia. In the day it was possible to see all the way to the salt flats, but at night all of this disappeared to a blankness, with no lights at all.

He was marched with Saif and the foreigners to a cave at the top of a hill. Saif insisted on walking into the cave. The other fighters were too frightened to follow.

‘Come with me,’ Saif said to him.

So he went inside too.

There was a pit in the centre of the cave.

‘It goes all the way to hell,’ Saif whispered.

They got down on their bellies and inched their way to the edge. Saif threw a stone in and it was lost, there was no sound of it at all.

‘Let us see,’ Saif said.

A coolness flowed up from it. Somewhere in the earth’s mantle, or in another province of existence, or present in one of the diatoms on the walls, Saif believed, was a city of jinn. James saw a glistening in the pit, water dripping, or perhaps something else. What would happen if he threw himself in? In what part of the world would he find himself? As soon as he thought this he was overcome with dizziness. Saif, for his part, was shaking uncontrollably. Without a word to one another, they crawled back.

The fear that most often accompanies the presence of jinn is the fear of losing the faculty of reason. That is exactly what he felt; the rock giving way under him, something trying to pick him up and twirl him in the air. There were voices, movements. He was frightened and yet curiously happy, because the fear did not belong to his captivity.

Saif tried to say a prayer aloud at the cave entrance, but stumbled on the words and did not finish the last verse. The other fighters were shouting further down the hill. They had convinced themselves jinn were scavenging bones around them. Saif took the safety off his gun and ran down the hill. He followed; it was a moment when he was the same as Saif, sharing the same uncertainty.

*

Saif believed in jinn. The CIA was a jinn agency. So was James’s true employer. There were also righteous jinn, Saif said, who whispered into the breasts of those about to die in battle.

‘You know, Water, the Jews control jinn,’ Saif said, the next day.

‘How is that?’

‘It has always been so. You think Jews gain wealth and power through work alone? No, no. Solomon himself used jinn to build up the temple in Jerusalem. If you were ever to find a lamp in which a jinn is trapped, you will see that the magic spell on the lamp is written in Hebrew, yes, not Arabic.’

If jinn were manifestations of thoughts that were in the world before the existence of man – ursine, monstrous to behold – what would the creatures of the thoughts left by man look like?

He made love to her in his room. He placed her on her knees on the Turcoman rug. She was heaved forward, holding onto nothing.

It was his last night at the Hotel Atlantic. He insisted she share his bed. She fell asleep in his arms immediately. The weight of her was on his chest. He could not sleep – it was the food, the caffeine, also the taking leave – and as he lay there, in spite of the Christmas cheer and the sinking of the evening to the slave ship, he could not get out of his mind his own body, how his muscles were only holding in liquids.

They lay in bed all morning. She rode him rhythmically. She felt run through, defeated; the turning that had thrown them together was about to pull them apart. It was a hotel. You came, you left.

‘I’ll swim in the sea this afternoon,’ she said, when she was dressing.

‘Not by yourself.’

‘I’m strong. I’ll keep to the shore.’ She hesitated, she was nervous. ‘What if I came to visit you in Nairobi?’

‘Don’t say it if you don’t mean it,’ he said. He smiled, but at the same time he was thinking, she can’t. ‘I’ll take you to Lamu.’

‘I want to swim in your pool.’

He left after lunch. He was meant to catch the evening Eurostar from Paris to Leeds. The same taxi driver was waiting for him. The same Mercedes.

She stood on the steps. The sign spelling Hotel Atlantic looked suddenly clownish. She was a stranger to him. He did not know her. Everything was running in reverse, the opposite of when they met on the beach. The sun broke through the clouds in such a way that even the snow appeared to drift up. He was walking backwards down the steps. Then something strange happened to the light, the colours shifted, the parkland went blue, and she walked down the steps and put her arms around him and he kissed her tenderly on the lips and they understood they were in love. He knew her, had known her, would know her. Nothing was in reverse – not the snow, not them – everything was as it was meant to be.

She pushed him away and pulled down her sweater sleeves over her hands. She folded her arms across her chest.

He looked at her once more. Took her in. She was different. The space between places had collapsed, people were propelled through the sky in pressurised cabins, but she was opening up another world in the world.

He got in the taxi and closed the door. She waved once and walked back into the hotel. The Algerian gave him a warm greeting and he returned pleasantries, enough to warm the cab.

The local train stations were all snowed in so they had to drive for an hour to a larger town that was on the main line. At one point in the journey they came up a steep hill and the car slid across the road into a ditch. He got out and pushed. It gave easily. He followed the car up the hill. When he was at the top, the car ahead of him, the brake lights,
the exhaust, he found himself at the edge of a cliff and saw the Atlantic breaking on the rocks below.

A few kilometres further on, his mobile rang.

‘It’s me, it’s Danny,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to say I miss you already.’

‘Let me turn around.’

He would have done. She did not reply immediately. He could hear the wind. Then her voice was clearer. She must have cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘I’m going for my swim now. Merry Christmas.’

‘Merry Christmas, Danny.’

In the last scene of August Strindberg’s novella
By the Open Sea
, an arrogant and maniacal fishing inspector, Axel Borg, breaks down when confronted with his own mediocrity, something he has despised in almost everyone else.

A steamer is wrecked on Huvudskär, the island in the Stockholm archipelago to which he has been posted. It is laying on its side just offshore, its white and black funnel broken and its vermilion bottom shining like a blood-stained, shattered breast. He is feverish, half-mad. He staggers along the treeless shore, slipping on the red gneiss scraped clean of lichen by pack ice, and sees dark figures floating and twisted like worms on hooks among the masts and yards of the steamer.

He wades out into the icy waters, the waves slopping over him, and gathers in armfuls of gaily dressed children:

Some had fair fringes on their foreheads, others dark. Their cheeks were rosy and white, and their large, wide-open blue eyes stared straight up at the black sky and neither moved nor blinked.

They were a consignment of dolls.

There is another world in our world, but we have to live in this one. Jellies we are, washed up on the shore.