Alif the Unseen (7 page)

Alif felt his eyes begin to swim. “You’re talking about—”

“The Hand,” said Abdullah triumphantly. “Is it a program? A man? Now we know: it’s both. Hand in glove, so to speak.”

“It gets better,” said Faris, looking more at ease, “When they referred to this person, they called him ‘ibn al sheikh.’”

Alif gaped at him. “He’s
royalty
?”

“That’s right!” crowed Abdullah, “We’re being nibbled to death by a silk-diapered aristocrat!”

“You sound almost happy,” said Alif, disgusted.

“I’m not,” said Abdullah. “I’m terrified. This is hysteria you’re witnessing.”

Alif sat down on the welder’s bench in the center of the room and put his head in his hands.

“The Hand broke into my machine yesterday,” he said quietly.

Abdullah’s eyes widened. Faris grunted in sympathy. “It’s happening more and more,” he said. “You do what you can—change your handle, change all your
passwords, switch to a new Internet provider or get a revolving IP address. And do it fast. You’ve got maybe another twenty-four hours, tops.”

Abdullah shook his head, looking pale. “Alif moves in more rarefied ether than the rest of us. His case is not so simple. If the Hand has cracked him, we are all doomed men.”

Alif looked up at Faris. “How long until we have a name?” he asked.

Faris sighed. “I’m not sure. There has to be a record of this person’s work at the ministry—it’s just a matter of finding it. I’m mining their database
remotely from my home computer right now.”

“Okay.” Alif stood. Sweat made his T-shirt cling to his back. “I have to go. Call me as soon as you know anything else.”

“Courage.” Abdullah gave him a lopsided smile. Alif slapped him on the shoulder.

“Thank you, brother.”

* * *

He took a detour on the way home in an attempt to calm down. There was a little irrigated plot of date palms at the edge of Baqara District, the remnant of an orchard some
wealthy cattle merchant had refused to sell when the City overran its walls. Since no deed to the land could be found, the plot sat untouched, an odd bucolic interruption in the dust-colored rows
of apartments. Several years earlier a taxi driver from Gujarat had begun to pollinate the feral trees again. Now people in the neighborhood enjoyed a tiny date harvest every autumn, drying and
storing the fruit in their homes like farmers.

The plot had already been stripped of this year’s sticky bounty and was quiet when Alif arrived. He skirted along a hillock separating two shallow canals that ran among the trees,
breathing in a green stifling scent and imagining himself refortified. He thought of the woman with black-and-orange hair. His groin tightened. A breeze lifted the palm fronds above his head,
scattering their shadows across his damp limbs. The trees, like the woman in his dreams, belonged to some other mode of being and were not quite real. Alif lay down on the earth and closed his
eyes. He would stay here until the stress and sweat drained from his body and he could think again.

The slapping sound of a woman’s sandals from beyond the edge of the orchard interrupted him. Alif recognized Dina’s discreet, feminine gait. He rose, jogging along the hillock toward
the street until the sound of traffic and machines returned.

“Sister,” he called. Dina turned. With an uneasy feeling Alif noticed the box under her arm.

“How funny,” she said. “I was just coming to see you. I’ve been back to the Old Quarter.” She lifted the box in her hands.

Alif swallowed. “Why,” he asked hoarsely.

“Your friend called me.”

“You gave her your number?”

“She asked. It seemed impolite to refuse. Besides, her father was watching.”

Alif felt his eyes begin to burn.

“She said she had something to give to you,” Dina continued. “So I met her at her house. She looked as though she’d been standing on her head . . . hair a mess, circles
under her eyes. She gave me back the box you sent—it feels heavier now—and turned me away. Without offering me tea or anything. It was all very rude.”

Alif took the box from her hands.

“I don’t like being summoned by rich girls like somebody’s maid,” said Dina. “I don’t understand why she couldn’t just call you or e-mail you if she
wanted to give you something.”

“She can’t e-mail me,” Alif murmured. Something slid along the bottom of the box. He looked around: women on their way to the souk regarded him curiously.

“Let’s go.” Alif did not quite touch Dina’s shoulder to lead her.

“What? Where?”

“Just into the date orchard. I can’t open this on the street.” He ducked back in between the palms. Dina sighed and followed him.

“Can’t it wait until you get home? People will get the wrong idea if we hide in here together.”

“Fuck people.”

Dina gasped. Alif ignored her, sitting down on a patch of sunlit dirt and reaching into his pocket for the Swiss Army Knife he carried. The box had been taped shut in a hurry, leaving wrinkled
tacky edges. He slit the seams and looked inside.

“What the hell,” he muttered.

“What is it?” Dina peered over his shoulder. Alif lifted out a book bound in dark blue linen. It was evidently quite old—brittle to the touch and faded in places. A faint odor
emanated from its pages. For a disconcerting moment, Alif was reminded of Intisar’s pale arms in the afterglow of their lovemaking.

“It’s a book,” he said.

“I can see that,” said Dina, “but the title’s blurred out. I can’t read it.”

Alif lifted the manuscript into the light and squinted at it. The title appeared to be written by hand in an old-fashioned kind of Arabic calligraphy, with gold ink. It was flaking badly and some
of the letters were barely visible. He was startled to discover that the first word was his own name.

“Alif,” he said excitedly. “It says Alif!” Dina snatched the book from his hands.

“No it doesn’t,” she said after a moment. “It says alf.
Alf Yeom wa Yeom
.
The Thousand and One Days.
”

Alif sat back on his heels.

“It must be a joke,” he said.

“It looks serious to me.” Dina held up the manuscript, turning it one way and then the other. “See how old it is? And it smells like—like—”

“I know,” said Alif hastily, flushing. “But what does it mean? Why did she send it?”

Dina rolled her eyes. “You’re asking me? I’ve only met her twice. I could have told you that running around with a stuck-up silk slipper behind her father’s back was a
bad idea. No wonder you’ve gotten so strange—”

“All right, all right.” Alif jerked the book out of Dina’s hands. The sun beat down on his dark hair and made sweat stand up on his scalp. He wanted coffee and the cool of his
bedroom, the pleasant familiar hum of his machines. “Never mind. Thank you for bringing this to me. I’m sorry I got you involved.”

Dina’s eyes looked hurt. She stood, gathering the folds of her robe with offended elegance.

“Here, wait.” Alif felt guilty. “I’ll walk home with you. If we leave together without shame people will assume we were in here to pick the last of the dates.”

“Thank you.” Dina walked to the edge of the orchard without looking at him. Alif tucked the book back into the box and followed her. They passed between the jagged palm trunks and
were immediately deafened by the late-afternoon traffic that moved down the street in one overheated mass. A skinny man on a moped reached out for Dina’s veil as he sped past. Alif cursed at
him, running a few steps before Dina called him back.

“It’s just a donkey whose mother raised him wrong,” she said, adjusting the black fabric over the bridge of her nose. “The City is full of them.”

“You should have let me catch up,” Alif muttered. “I’d teach him what his mother couldn’t.”

Dina moved closer to him. They walked in silence, threading through a series of named and unnamed streets until their own block appeared beyond an intersection.

“I’ll stop at the pharmacy,” said Dina. “Baba’s liver is acting up again. It’ll only take a minute.”

“Okay.” Alif waited as she ducked into a white storefront that advertised its wares in Tamil. When they got home he would take a shower and change into the gray house-kurta his
grandmother had sent him from India, the one made of cotton so soft it felt like a baby’s blanket. Then he would put a cold compress on his eyes and try to make sense of the day’s
events.

The smell of frying
papadums
wafted down from a cook shop in the next street, mingling with gasoline and dust: a greasy comforting scent he had known since childhood. Their little
corner of the City was reassuringly solid, unchanged by what had happened in the past thirty-six hours. Alif’s tragedies seemed to spring from some perverse timeline to which Baqara District
was not a party.

Alif’s gaze drifted to the garden in front of their duplex, half-visible between the neighboring apartment blocks. A man was loitering near the front gate. Alif squinted. He was an Arab,
clean-shaven, wearing a white
thobe
and sunglasses. He stood as though he was waiting to meet someone or expected an imminent delivery. Alif had waited at the gate in a similar fashion a
hundred times, to receive the butcher’s boy, the ironing man, the fruit seller. But that was not strange, because this was his house.

“What’s the matter?” asked Dina, exiting the pharmacy with a brown paper bag.

“There’s a man standing in front of our place,” said Alif. “Looking like he owns it.”

Dina peered down the street. “Must be waiting for someone,” she said. “Maybe he’s a friend of Baba’s. Or could he be looking for your father?”

“I don’t—” Alif’s phone buzzed in his pocket, interrupting him. He pulled it out and touched an icon on the screen: it was a text message from Abdullah. He opened
it.

Faris says: Abbas Al Shehab
.

Points of light danced in front of Alif’s eyes.

“Are you all right?” Dina looked at him in alarm. “You’ve gone pale!” She said his given name in an anxious voice. He barely recognized it, or her.

“Please—” Her voice came out of a hazy brightness. “Answer me. I’m getting scared.”

He mouthed a prayer. Adrenaline shot through his veins like an angelic answer, clearing his mind in one ringing blow. He grabbed Dina’s arm. “I need you to do something for
me,” he said. “Quickly, without any fuss.”

Dina looked from his hand to his face. “Okay,” she whispered.

“Knock on my door and tell the maid you need to get a novel you lent me. Tell her it’s in my room. Go up and get my netbook. It’s sitting on my desk next to the main computer.
And get—” His throat closed. “Get the gray kurta that’s hanging in my wardrobe, on the left.”

Dina’s chest rose and fell rapidly beneath her robe. “What’s going on?” she asked in a low voice.

“That man is waiting for me.”

“What have you done?
What have you done?
”

Alif fought to keep his breathing steady. “I’ll tell you everything, I swear—I’ll tell you whatever you want. Just do this first. It’s not safe for me to go home
now.”

Dina left him without a word. Alif watched as she crossed the street, paper bag clutched tight against her body. He held his breath when the man at the gate stopped her. Dina shifted from foot
to foot, gesturing toward the New Quarter at one point with a hand that fluttered and shook. As she turned toward the house, the man grabbed her wrist.

Alif bolted across the street without thinking. As he neared the gate, Dina met his eyes with a look that stopped him dead: a terrible look, a warning, her pupils collapsing into tiny dots. He
noticed irrelevantly that her eyes were flecked with green, forming starburst patterns around her pupils, like copper suns. Alif would have reached for the Arab man’s arm, or even hit him,
but Dina’s gaze forced him back with a pressure that was almost physical, and he found himself retreating step by step until he stood at the edge of the street.

Dina twisted deftly out of the man’s grasp and continued toward the house. The Arab man turned away from her, pulling a crease from the sleeve of his
thobe
in a gesture of
irritation. He looked up and, for a moment, Alif saw his own startled reflection in the man’s sunglasses. Alif ducked behind the corner of the apartment block next door, panting. The box
containing Intisar’s book puckered as he held it to his damp chest. The Arab man did not follow him.

The alleyway between the two buildings was lined with bags of garbage awaiting collection day; pools of reeking yellow fluid had formed beneath them, crisscrossing the unpaved earth to meet one
another in rivulets. Alif gagged, straightened, and gagged again, tasting bile. He was still heaving when Dina touched him on the shoulder.

“Don’t speak,” she whispered. “He’s still there. Keep walking down the alley.”

Alif stumbled to obey her. They made their way along a thin spit of clear ground that ran through the trash, Dina bundling up her robe to keep it from dragging in muck. When they emerged into
the next street, she punched Alif on the arm.

“Ow!
Damn
it!” He glared at her, rubbing the sore spot.

“You stupid, careless, selfish son of a dog,” she said, voice shaking. “You’ve put all of us in danger. Our families, our neighbors. Do you know who that was? That was a
detective from State security. Oh, yes.” She shoved a backpack into his arms. “Here, take your stuff.”

Alif stared at her, slack-jawed. “I can’t believe you just said a swear word,” he said. “I didn’t know you knew any swear words.”

“Don’t be an idiot and don’t change the subject.”

Alif flushed and hugged the backpack to his chest. “What’s in here?” he asked.

“What you asked for, plus some clean socks and a toothbrush. And a bag of dates.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Really. You’re—I’m sorry about your wrist.” He glanced at her black sleeve, feeling ashamed. “This is the second time today
I should have protected you and couldn’t. I owe you better.”

“You owe me an explanation.”

“Fine, yes, you’re right.” Alif glanced around anxiously, bundling Intisar’s book into his backpack and letting the box drop. “Not here. We’ll go to my friend
Abdullah’s place.”