Fire in the Unnameable Country (59 page)

The Re-Employment Office is located in the Ministry of Records and Sources, a sarcophagous building of filing cabinets and papers, whose archives we already know as caverns subdivided into quadrants of shelves storing human thoughts, a building of doors and offices behind whose doors appointed and hired officials pace while reciting transcribed tortured minds ex cathedra.

Its front hallway extends into the empty distance. Door after door forces our hero to closely follow a pocketed map from a table near the entrance wonders location of the Re-Employment Office. From the crinkle sheet diagram, at a point where the hall inclines, the lights disappear. That's when Hedayat feels bodies appear suddenly, breathing onto bodies making fetid smells. From the commotion, he senses a crowd gather ex nihilo in the dark place as he tries to gather his senses.

He feels a shoulder, a neck, parcels, wheeled luggage, before he remembers he has a lighter. With that butane flicker only light in all the world he forays between shadows: workers hunchbacks giants bend against the ceiling as dwarves and huddled women comfort children. Hedayat asks a lady with her child in a cesta basket mere flickers in a hallway: Do you know where the Re-Employment Office is. The woman's
reply is lost to tug on her hair cascades to her hips, to the child's cry, its ear-rending wail for another mealbite from her hands, you are looking for the Re-Employment Office, says the woman lifts hand from child. She turns her gaze from the cesta basket and allows me to see her old face its fissures, her mirror eyes designed by successive generations of hallway pilgrims to catch all the meagre light of the dark indoors.

Everyone hears stories in our unnameable country of weatherblown travellers journeying hallways and concourses and escalators elevators, and this woman is surprised I don't know the names. She looks into my lighter's light; her eyes reflect its flame. Find the assistant supervisor, of course, she says, before tilting her head back and laughing: we are all looking for the assistant supervisor. Others around her laugh with her at the old joke, and before I can ask who is/ the woman rude eyes suddenly shadows, believe it, indistinguishable as my lighter's flame stalls.

My lighter's momentary respite, its revelation of a heterogeneous world of people and locations, the perimeters of walls, floors, ceilings, disappears into indiscernible coarse cloth, expletives and pushes, groans as I am carried in that dark sway for hours or days until thirst swallows hunger as the greater need, until trickles down my pant legs, I am adding to the odours, I think. Somehow in the waves of motion, for step after endless step of momentum provided by my legs on auto, I fall asleep.

In my moving bed upright stiff-necked, I dream of a game of running and touching opponents in turn. Every playground contact makes red geranium follicles burst arms torso ribs and gullet, from everywhere on my body. I jerk awake to so many visible hallway shapes of crowd and walls I pat the inner pocket of the inner pocket of my shirt where the velveteen package, wonder for a moment whether to wear one of the bootlaces for flight gifted to me by the sorcerer who claimed to be Niramish's uncle, and leap over all the shapes, and realized the
interrogators had burned that magic. Suddenly the moving crowd comes to a stop, single file in front of a door ajar, and around them stand tents and sleeping bags, the miserable, sick, the geriatric and hallway-born young who have made a campground in front of the bureau.

Quickly, I find my way near the front of the line, to an area of slight reprieve around the door because I see light, actual light, light despite bodies and obstructions believe it, light from the ceiling or a lamp behind a door, delightful light after all the darkness, yet no one enters. Is there an official inside who's going to come and see us, I ask. Minutes become hours and I decide to honour my curiosity, break from the line, and walk toward the door. A man with a bowtie notices my discomfort and tries to dissuade me cautiously, kindly: he points to the concourse of intersecting pathways nearby and tells me this office is the locus of many journeys; soothsayers have sworn by this door for many years, which they claim is the Re-Employment Office. The door is ajar, Hedayat points, why hasn't anyone tried to find the truth.

We have made important discoveries, the man nodded to his hallway friends, who hummed in compliance.

Has he ever addressed your concerns, I pointed to the tents, the gas ovens cooking midday meals in the hallway. Near the tents, an old man tasted from a pot of boiled fluid, smiled as he lifted it to his lips. The smell of lentils and onions invited whiffs and grumbling stomachs.

The Ministry of Records and Sources is a vast civil and economic enterprise and Department officials are known to grant meetings to hallway refugees on rare occasions. But I'm alive, I protested. Do I have to wait with the refugees.

The Department takes advocates and caregivers to be the same as the ghosts they serve, informed the bowtie conversant.

How often does he see you, Hedayat asked.

The bowtie conversant laughed: Though no one has seen the assistant supervisor, voices have been known to emerge from inside the bureau. Phone calls, one presumes. How the assistant supervisor comes and goes is also a mystery. We believe in an inner door linking the office to other parts of the building via passageways accessible only to Department employees, and have tried to listen by stethoscope provided by aid workers for creaking hinges inside, but no one has ever heard such sounds. However, just today, I myself witnessed a hand inside push the door for fresh air, though we travellers can attest, he laughed, to the asphyxiating atmosphere on this side.

If the Re-Employment Office might lie behind this door, why not just open it and find the truth, I asked, and the two men began giggling, gesturing to the people around them, who joined in the fun.

What are you waiting for, Hedayat raised his voice, and they laughed harder.

Has anyone entered this room, he finally yelled.

Have they entered, the bowtie conversant exploded onto his friend's face, apologized, wiped the spit away before the pair began laughing together, each egged on by the other until they had to hold their aching sides.

I don't get the joke, said Hedayat.

Have they entered, began the second conversant before bubbling again, quivering, quieted this time by his friend's gentle hand.

The door is open. I am merely asking if you've gone inside.

People have died trying to exit, exclaimed the man with the bowtie finally.

For a moment, Hedayat weighed his options. So much time had passed, he had nearly forgotten why he ventured underground today, and he wished he could see both directions in the hallway before deciding the shortest route back to the Halfway House. But the crowd
began to simmer around him suddenly and the air became too hot and too foul to breathe. Bodies drew closer together, clotted the hallway, while, because Hedayat was close enough to the door, he could feel a refreshing breeze blow from inside the room. Time passed and so many minutes dragged shouts, infants' cries, grown men and women in a sweating crowd churning muddy water, sediments, immeasurable wait, that a chink of hope, a door with the slightest opening, despite Bowtie Man's mortal warning, seemed like Hedayat's only plausible option.

Hedayat pushed the door open and the others who were flung into the room with him ran out immediately, crying anxiously, accursed place. Inexplicably, the heavy metal door slammed shut. When he found his feet again, he walked slowly because he had to part the dense shadows with his hands before he could see the first wall twenty feet away with its grey spines adjacent to one another like books until the next crowded wall of rectangular shapes separated by an indentation, walkways through which one could see walls coming and going, intersecting perpendicular in soft light. Dead light in the distance, rested ancient thoughts. Fluorescent lights high above.

Soft pebbly light fell onto the floor. Rough steps, Hedayat stumbled in a narrow passage. Clangour as he stepped foot over foot tripping foot, and something fell onto the floor. He stared at the rows of nocturnal shelves on either side of him. Then another sound, a syllable or rock hurled somewhere behind him against a metal case. Where am I, he thinks. Where is Hedayat.

I am in a dead world, I mused, without corpses, only coffins and tombstones. If there is life after death here, it is hidden and much bigger than the living world, a collection of all the minds on magnetic reel.
The Mirror
wants to be this place, Hedayat shivered, it wants every
thought in every jar. Hedayat recalled how when they tortured him they showed him his life's most intimate moments. He thought how his heart fumbled when he saw the male protagonist, Hedayatesque, on television patting sheets in an empty bed in the middle of the dark. Recall his rage and confusion at how could they know and take my deepest fears of being deserted by her.
The Mirror
wants moments like that, he thought, to multiply a billion times bigger by ingesting all the realities that were and are, might have been and could be in the unnameable country, where traces of histories my glossolalist tongue never ventured to describe exist somewhere in this haunted library, where even traces of non-lives must exist on thoughtreel.

What would have happened, I ask, if my grandmother had never surrendered her shoe servant's job and migrated to the unnameable country. Would her bejewelled grey eyes have haunted Zachariah Ben Jaloun. Imagine, even after arriving at our shores, my grandmother finds her first weeks of life in the Ministry of Records and Sources so stifling she chooses to apply at the Bata department store near her home, and that after repeated visits to insist upon the strength of her footwear credentials, she earns a salesperson's job.

As this version of the story goes, she never ends up meeting Zachariah Ben Jaloun's border crossing, never goes to his standalone café either, where instead of drowning in onion-tears, in this version of things, he decides not to break things off with one Marjane B, theatre reviewer for the
Victoria Star, Benediction Post,
and assorted literary magazines, his fling directly prior to our story, a relationship unsettled by squabbles of the working poor, and which, it must be noted, was the cause of his hallucinogenic poetry in his volume
Orange Blossoms.

In this version of the story, Marjane's work in literature, her publicist's charm, helps the book catch lucky break after lucky break and become a national and international hit. Zachariah files for temporary leave from his border guard's post and starts writing fiction and poetry
full-time, furiously. Marjane and Zachariah move into an intimate, clean little flat where, soon, along comes a baby in swaddling clothes. Barely minutes newly born, still wet with mother water, what shall we call him, Marjane asks. Zachariah disappears into the recesses of some parallel consciousness: Mamun, he says.

What if my grandmother and grandfather never met is what Hedayat means. Hedayat spins glossolalist in the airless Archives, lets himself feel the eeriness for one moment of having never been born, unruly free, unhindered by even the prison walls of the human heart or body.

I, if that is the proper term, wander thinking, hunting Ariadne thread for a clue out of this labyrinth of thoughts, its door shut firmly behind me, the Assistant Supervisor or his superior nowhere to be found, and its future of wandering twisting miles, millennia in search of my beginning, as I think and hope that though Zachariah might have biting onions into verses better with Marjane and Zachariah's détente, his border guard boss would probably one day have ordered him into Department 6119's dungeon due to reasons beyond them both, that Gita with the grey eyes and my grandfather would surely eventually have made Mamun out of kisses and kismet. I rest my hand against a shelf of metal receptacles: and we have another generation to go before Hedayat, I think, before Hedayat's big bang, years' out of gestation in an unnameable sky that still sets fire to millions of people below, before the involuntary contractions of my mother's body shiver and ache on a flying carpet that Alauddin the magician drives, as you know, before her howl with eyes poised above at the airless oblivion, as