Fire in the Unnameable Country (57 page)

You cried, said Habib.

Not then but later in the scene, I told him in our cell an hourglass. They burned your chest.

And my arms, my throat, I said as the sand poured steady from the hole in the ceiling, as a red metal taste and shiver and I crumpled onto my bed. I thought about the terror.

They changed scenes.

They played another part of the film.

Then you cried.

Yes.

They burned you again.

No, they clamped my mouth open

Then what, he asked softly after a long time.

They pulled my tongue out of my mouth with forceps.

Shit, Habib drew from a foul and nasty cigarette.

Knives, he asked.

Scissors, I said.

Lucky sonofabitch.

No shit, I said, and I said nothing while remembering the most frightening part of the movie, of Hedayatesque on-screen waking up deserted, to the male protagonist's unanswered howl before descending
into an unlit path, to string orchestral cries at his gymnastic leap at a car-horn blast and his log-roll onto the sidewalk. I watched him walk for another minute until they did a close-up of a nearby vagabond, pestilential shape, man in cloth, grey, worm-eaten, whose face under lamplight was five hundred years old, judging by appearances, and too much to bear. Hedayat knew what the film would show next as he clenched teeth and fist, directed his double back to bed in his mind along the straight street until the camera caught Hedayatesque in bed right in his kisser, his bewildered face crawling under sheets, shivering for a whole minute of what the hell until her naked figure, moist sepals, her tongue doused, warm. Where did you go. To get a drink of water, where did you go, she asked, as the scene ended with arms legs entwined embrace. Now I realize the leap from life into
Mirror
, Hedayat thought as they showed him the film, the robbery of one's very mind, love and all.

They burned the bootlaces, asked Habib.

I sighed. If the contest was glossolalia versus
The Mirror,
Black Organs was insisting
The Mirror
had already eaten everything, even your thoughts, your desires, and that all the magic in the world, every inexplicable feeling image or event was on a Hollywood reel.

Imprisonment. Privation. Loss. Suffering. Over the years, my busted insides became a central point of comparison between more suffering or less suffering, and how my prison pains compared with the break and shards that happened at the airport, in the coldest room in the world just before my arrest. In all our years pissing in the same toilet and sleeping in the same room that filled up to the neck each day with sand through a precise bullet-hole in the ceiling before they vacuumed it up so it could fill again tomorrow. I seldom told Habib of my life and
learned little about his apart from the fact that he had once been in business with two men named Yasin and Kabir, spidersilk salesmen that had retired and now owned and operated a brothel in La Maga. The three of them had been accused of hiding weapons-grade spidersilk for antiballistic garb somewhere underground, which is to say such materials were never discovered to verify the accusations, and Habib was still serving time. He had grown children, he told me, and said that I reminded him of his eldest son, Raul, who had studied ergonomics in Germany and was designing the most comfortable chairs in Europe for a furniture manufacturer. You both have the same beaking lips, Habib said. It's just that you have eyes like an owl and fucked-up hands.

Confined men dream, they predict the future, play cards, smoke, and talk of women or angels. One day, during the hour each day when we were allowed to talk, when the guards pacing silk shoes weren't counting decibels with the most sensitive audiometers, my cellmate narrated once upon a time, there lived a woman in a house to which sand water and the Gulf of Eden were all accessible from a Blue Lagoon Room, where indoors were your own private outdoors the moment you agreed to the night's wages of the most appeasing woman in the world. What was her name. Laila. Where did you meet her. In the nightingale street where children and birds are often mistaken for one another due to the accuracy of the water whistles sold there. Vague directions, Habib. Best I can do under the circumstances, I'm afraid, he drew huge from a foul cigarette. Unfortunate, I said.

Habib tried again, recommended a boardinghouse a shared rent space near Laila's brothel, and gave directions, recognizable street names. Look her up, he recommended, and I humoured him, yeah, when she's my grandmama's age, I'll get out of here enough to lower her jeans. Habib rolled dice in his hands, he frowned, muttered under his breath, rolled again and said you'll be there sooner than you think, sly winking, rolling dice in the associative manner he said allowed him
to relate sounds in the environment with dice numbers with correct predictions of the future. He got so good, he claimed, that he could tell from thumps in the adjacent room and two dice rolls whether the inmate three cells away was going to make it through the night, whether they were going to be on time with our dinner trays, and whether the rumours of a listeriosis epidemic were true or not. I told him how afraid I was of never feeling the sun at my back again, but he told me after a secret roll of dice and peer into his right palm not to worry, that I was about to be assisted by some heavy-duty hardware. Prison breaks were rare, they did occur on occasion, one major incident at another prison splashed international headlines when they reared a bread truck full of bombs, when they ruptured wall motor oil fumes, brick and twisted metal for the release of several Taints serving time after a simple jewel-thieving hustle in the 1970s, but I wondered who would pull a stunt like that on my behalf. I didn't ask Habib how he knew any of the things he claimed to know, his predictions were often correct so I encouraged him to speak his mind in the one hour of each day we were allowed to speak. The rest of the time, I usually thought alone in my corner of the cell, breathed heavy behind neckerchief sand filter read tawdry magazines, and, because our cell block was a silent region of the prison, I didn't say anything. Sometimes, I smoked Habib's shit cigarettes in a corner to try and avoid the constant trickle of sand in our hourglass cell.

One Monday night, while I was deep sleeping, a fee fi giant squeezed into our prison room and hauled me out of bed with enormous pliers. His partner, a rotund creature several feet high, conked Habib with a hammer on the head thin stream of blood and out cold. Flashes of doors light and shadow, they led me down dim-lit hallways overflow latrines, row upon row of salt-and-water-accustomed occupation prisoners, silent corridors, softscream soundproof walls until a courtyard where wandered an eminent vizier from centuries earlier, muttering,
bubbling under breath release me sultan, I wasn't the one that stole your flying carpet, it was Alauddin.

There, the giant who caught me huge pliers made me stand under a baobab branch in the courtyard the vizier's eternal prison. His accomplice found the shovel eats earth mounds, dug deeper until space enough to store a man. The unceremonious scenario of my life's end brought me chortling choking tears, laughing as pale blood circled my body, hard to breathe even before they noosed me up to treebranch. Stand before the grave, they ordered, and I disobeyed them shrank to the size of a grain of sand to avoid them. Unsurprised at my struggle, my strategy to defy death, they pawed the earth, searching for my shape in the dust, tossed tufts of grass, dug mountains, struck deserts in frustration as I ran without a thought in my mind, hid in the shadows of one blade of grass after another until the morning sun beat me exhausted back into a man's size and found me drinking from a shallow fountain at the edge of the courtyard farthest from the entrance.

Then what, Hedayat. Did you die. No, the simple truth is, I lived. Deus ex machina: as unnatural as it sounds for all their efforts against me as a man a speck of dust, when they found me a thirsty animal lapping water with my hands at the fountain near the courtyard's edge, they caught me gotcha to tell me I was free to go. Sometimes, they let you go to catch you again, I thought nervously about the records of such arrests; sometimes, however, I thought the opposite truth, Habib's predictions actually came true. Astonished at the wind in my hair, the early sun at my back, I wondered what else he was right about.

I travelled intuitively through La Maga's streets twisting into alleyways where kids busted bottles with bottlecaps in opposing teams of threes and fours. In an avenue that clanged the sound of every bird in the world water whistling warbling ululating though there wasn't a feather in sight, just schoolkids, two men played chess in front of a row of smoke-stained houses. One of them clutched a wand of bread under
his armpit while the other man opened a valise in which was stored a vase of red wine.

I paused to watch them negotiate a complicated arrangement on the chessboard; they exchanged a knight and a rook after long deliberation, and because of my interest in their game, divided the bread and shared the wine with me. Curious of Habib's stories and of the fact that my feet found their way exactly here, I conversed with the men, called Yasin and Kabir, who shared their lives' stories with me, which culminated in seventeen children whose precise genealogy has grown inscrutable over the years, they said.

They all live inside, Yasin reminds between mouthfuls, and says that all the boys, as far as he can remember, all called Victor, while all the girls are known as Laila. They play chess until the sun goes and the noises inside go louder and the voices become hoarse from all the shouting. Then matrons with expanded waists emerge from within, and soon there emerge, with the realization of there sits a nameless guest, various appetizing dishes that answer the question of what's for dinner tonight.

Eventually, we enter the house. And what cacophony then, strange men seated on chairs, delivered single-bite mouth amusers by uniformed servers, salmon roe and basil canapés, stuffed mushrooms, among other eats one might find in a hotel lounge or an abode of ill repute. Then we are covered by the shadows of guitarists, moth-eaten, blue painted, sitting waiting like the rest of us, while behind closed doors play vowels between the tongues of strangers. The red wine is now a thousand pinpricks on my skin, and these commingle until there emerges a girl in a dusty dress made of what appears like actual butterfly wings moving lapping chatting their many private languages, whose owner is Laila, which we already know from my mention, and who calls a number that means me.

Then I go with her, my Galapagos girl in her living dress her glossolalist butterfly garment, up the stairs and down a hallway, which
recedes in width and height but not in length, through which we crawl and which could easily be called a crawlspace, until she stops at the right tiny door and pulls a latch that opens a tiny aperture. There she loves me, my Galapagos girl, on a fishnet island raised above the actual seawater so that it would appear the whole continent was enjoying with us our mouths for meals for hungry senses.

The chess players, I venture, shift my position because her weight increases every minute, is either of them your father.

She answers with a glint in her teeth, which shines the yes of her profession.

You were just breaking bread with my father.

Yes.

And you are from prison.

I shifted her weight uncomfortably on top of me. Where do you live, she pressed her thighs against my chest, and I lost my breath in darkness. The shimmer, light flickering water in the room made her a giantess when I awoke. I'm looking for a place, I told her when she asked again where I lived; she looked at me a moment more, suspicious, before relaxing, becoming lighter, easier to bear on the knotted-rope hammock; her skin glistened, her kisses simmered, and an inviting musk overwhelmed me. Time passed. You're one of Habib's men, she said, and I didn't respond.

When we were finished, she ferried me on her back broad strokes on water to the small door, and instructed me to crawl through the tight hallway until the space grew large enough to let me stand. If you walk a left, two rights thereafter, she said, you reach a hallway you should follow until the canal near the boardinghouse Habib spoke of. Mention Laila, she urged.

I moved on all fours at first. During my prison years, the unnameable country had sprouted so many venal pathways and become one jumble-map, you didn't need to leave your roof in the morning anymore
to start work at the spidersilk factory, you just walked hallways or crawled there if the corridors demanded. Pathways changed daily with all the construction, so it didn't surprise me that Laila's directions were different from the actual road to Habib's boardinghouse. Hedayat tried to follow but wound up walking excuse me straight through someone's kitchen stewing fish in boiling pot while baby wailing. He cut through the room until the living room labyrinth of mirrors constructed at the Director's order many years earlier to make a movie set so complicated the Director himself was unable to navigate it. It took him a whole day to travel upstairs landing to front hallway, during which he was forced to follow a young camera assistant with a clipboard directed him past the guard tower, past guard dogs behind the sofa silenced with a whistle, and threaded him carefully through the barbed wire brought indoors for the desert firefight sequence in the film before the domestic scene near the dining room table.