Alif the Unseen Read online

  Alif the Unseen

  G. Willow Wilson

  The devotee recognizes in every divine Name the totality of Names.

  —Muhammad ibn Arabi, Fusus al Hikam

  If the imagination of the dervise produced the incidents of these stories, his judgment brought them to the resemblance of truth, and his images are taken from things that are real.

  —M. Petis de la Croix, Les Mille et Un Jours

  (The Thousand and One Days)

  For my daughter Maryam, born in the Arab Spring

  Chapter Zero

  Persia

  Long Ago

  The thing always appeared in the hour between sunset and full dark. When the light began to wane in the afternoon, casting shadows of grey and violet across the stable-yard below the tower where he worked, Reza would give himself over to shuddering waves of anxiety and anticipation. Each day, as evening approached, memory inevitably carried him back sixty years, to the arms of his wet-nurse.

  The twilight hour is when the jinn grow restless, she had told him.

  She was Turkish, and never threw his bath-water out the window without asking the pardon of the hidden folk who lived in the ground below. If she failed to warn them, the indignant creatures might curse her young charge, afflicting him with blindness or the spotted disease.

  When Reza was a young student, and had not yet learned wisdom, he dismissed her fears as superstition.

  Now he was an old man with failing teeth. As the sun flushed up, touching the dome of the shah’s palace across the square, a familiar terror began to provoke his bowels. His apprentice loitered at the back of the workroom, picking over the remains of his master’s lunch. Reza could feel the contemptuous look the pimpled youth leveled at his back as he stood in the window, watching the progress of the dying sun.

  “Bring me the manuscript,” said Reza, without turning. “Set out my inkwell and my reed pens. Make everything ready.”

  “Yes, master.”

  The youth’s tone was surly. He was the third son of a minor noble, and had neither scholarly nor spiritual inclinations to speak of. Once—only once—Reza had allowed the boy to remain when the thing visited him, hoping his apprentice would see, and understand, and tell Reza he was not mad. He did not. When the creature arrived, congealing inside the chalk-and-ash summoning circle Reza had drawn at the center of the workroom, the boy did not appear to notice. He stared at his master in blank irritation as the shadow in the circle unfolded itself and grew limbs, caricaturing the form of a man. When Reza addressed the apparition, the boy had laughed, scorn and disbelief mingling in his ringing voice.

  “Why?” Reza had asked the creature desperately, “Why won’t you let him see you?”

  In response, the thing had grown teeth: row after row of them, crowded together in a sickening grin.

  He chooses not to see, it said.

  Reza worried that the boy would report his master’s clandestine activities to his father, who would then alert the orthodox functionaries at the palace, who in turn would have him imprisoned for sorcery. But his apprentice had said nothing, and continued to return day after day for his lessons. It was only the lethargy of his service and the contempt in his voice that told Reza he had lost the boy’s respect.

  “The ink has dried on the pages I wrote yesterday,” Reza said when his apprentice returned with his pens and ink. “They’re ready for preservation. Have you mixed more varnish?”

  The boy looked up at him, color draining from his face. “I can’t,” he said, surliness evaporating. “Please. It’s too awful. I don’t want to—”

  “Very well,” said Reza with a sigh. “I’ll do it myself. You can go.” The boy bolted for the door.

  Reza sat down at his table, pulling a large stone bowl toward himself. The work would distract him until evening arrived. Into the bowl, he poured a portion of the precious mastic resin that had been simmering over a charcoal brazier since early morning. He added several drops of black oil from the seed of the nigella and stirred to keep the liquid from hardening. When he was satisfied with the consistency of the mixture, he gingerly lifted the linen veil from an unassuming metal pot sitting at one end of the work table. A scent filled the room: sharp, alarming, viscerally female.

  Reza thought of his wife, alive and blooming and big with the child that had died with her. This scent had permeated the linens of their bed before Reza ordered his servants to carry it away and burn it. For a moment, he felt lost. Forcing himself to be impassive, he separated what he needed from the viscous mess, and lifting it with metal tongs, dropped it unceremoniously into the cooling bowl of varnish. He counted out several minutes on his knuckles before looking in the bowl again. The varnish had turned as clear and glistening as honey.

  Reza carefully laid out the pages he had transcribed during the creature’s last visit. He wrote in Arabic, not Persian, hoping that this precaution would prevent his work from being misused should it fall into the hands of the uneducated and uninitiated. The manuscript was thus a double translation: first into Persian from the voiceless language in which the creature spoke, which fell on Reza’s ears like the night-echoes of childhood, when sleep was preceded by that solitary, fearful journey between waking and dreaming.

  Then from Persian into Arabic, the language of Reza’s education, as mathematical and efficient as the creature’s speech was diffuse. The result was perplexing. The stories were there, rendered as well as Reza could manage, but something had been lost. When the creature spoke, Reza would drift into a kind of trance, watching strange shapes amplify themselves again and again, until they resembled mountains, coastlines, the pattern of frost on glass. In these moments he felt sure he had accomplished his desire, and the sum of knowledge was within his reach. But as soon as the stories were fixed on paper, they shifted. It was as if the characters themselves—the princess, the nurse, the bird king, and all the rest—had grown sly, and slipped past Reza as he attempted to render them in human proportions.

  Reza dipped a horsehair brush into the stone bowl and began to coat the new pages in a thin layer of varnish. The nigella oil prevented the heavy paper from buckling. The other ingredient, the one his apprentice had obtained with so much misgiving, would keep the manuscript alive long after Reza himself had gone, protecting it from decay. If he could not unlock the true meaning behind the thing’s words, someone would, someday.

  Reza was so intent on his work that he did not notice when the sun slid past the dome of the palace, disappearing behind the dry peaks of the Zagros mountains on the far horizon. A chill in the room alerted him to the coming of twilight. Reza’s heart began to tap at his breastbone. Carefully, before the fear took hold in earnest, he placed the varnished pages on a screen to dry. On a shelf nearby were their companions, a thick sheaf of them, awaiting the completion of the final story. Once he was finished, Reza would sew the pages together with silk thread, and bind them between linen-covered pasteboards. And then what?

  The voice came, as always, from within his own mind. Reza straightened, his stiff joints cracking as he moved. He steadied his breathing.

  “Then I will study,” he said in a calm voice. “I will read each story again and again until I have committed them all to memory, and their power becomes clear to me.”

  The thing seemed amused. It had appeared without a sound, and sat quietly within the confines of its chalk-and-ash prison at the center of the room, regarding Reza with yellow eyes. Reza suppressed a shudder. The sight of the creature still filled him with warring sensations of horror and triumph. When Reza had first summoned it, he had half-disbelieved that such a powerful entity could be held at bay by a few well-chosen words written on the floor, words his illiterate housekeeper could sweep away without incurring any harm wh
atsoever. But it was so—a testament, he hoped, to the depth of his learning. Reza had bound the thing successfully, and now it was compelled to return day after day until it completed the narration of its stories.

  ‘I will study,’ it says. The thing’s voice was spiteful. But what can it hope to gain? The Alf Yeom is beyond its understanding.

  Reza drew his robes about him and squared his shoulders, attempting to look dignified.

  “So you claim, but your race was never known for honesty.”

  At least we’re honest with ourselves, and do not covet what is not ours. Man was exiled from the Garden for eating a single fruit, and now you propose to uproot the whole tree without the angels noticing. You’re an old fool, and the Deceiver whispers in your ear.

  “I am an old fool.” Reza sat down heavily on his workbench. “But now it’s too late to be otherwise. The only way forward is through. Let me complete my work, and I will release you.”

  The thing howled piteously and slammed itself against the edge of the circle. It was immediately knocked backward, rebuffed by a barrier Reza had created but could not see.

  What do you want? the creature whimpered. Why do you force me to tell you what I should not? These are not your stories. They are ours.

  “They are yours, but you don’t understand them,” snapped Reza. “Only Adam was given true intellect, and only the banu adam have the power to call things by their right names. What you call the bird king and the hind and the stag—these are only symbols to disguise a hidden message, just as a poet may write a ghazal about a toothless lion to criticize a weak king. Hidden in your stories is the secret power of the unseen.”

  The stories are their own message, said the thing, with something like a sigh. That’s the secret.

  “I will assign each element of each story a number,” said Reza, ignoring this alarming pronouncement, “And in doing so create a code that determines their quantitative relationship to one another. I will gain power over them—” He broke off. A breeze had stirred through the open window, and the scent of drying varnish wafted toward him. Reza thought again of his wife.

  You’ve lost something, said the creature shrewdly.

  “It’s not your problem.”

  No story or code or secret on earth can raise the dead.

  “I don’t want raise the dead. I just want to know—I want—”

  The thing listened. Its yellow eyes were fixed and unblinking. Reza remembered the herbal remedies, and the cupping, and the incense to clear the air, and the low terse words of the midwives as they moved about the bloody bed, pulling their veils over their mouths to speak to him as he stood by, useless and despairing.

  “Control,” he said finally.

  The creature sat back, draping its not-arms over its not-knees, and regarded him.

  Get your pen and paper, it said. I will tell you the final story. It comes with a warning.

  “What’s that?”

  When you hear it, you will become someone else.

  “What nonsense.”

  The creature smiled.

  Get your pen, it repeated.

  Chapter One

  The Persian Gulf

  Now

  Alif sat on the cement ledge of his bedroom window, basking in the sun of a hot September. The light refracted on his lashes. When he looked through them, the world became a pixilated frieze of blue and white. Staring too long in this unfocused way caused a sharp pain in his forehead, and he would look down again, watching shadows bloom behind his eyelids. Near his foot lay a thin chromescreened smartphone—pirated, though whether it came west from China or east from America he did not know. He didn’t mess with phones. Another hack had set this one up for him, bypassing the encryption installed by whatever telecom giant monopolized its patent. It displayed the fourteen text messages he had sent to Intisar over the past two weeks, at a self-disciplined rate of one per day. All went unanswered.

  He gazed at the smartphone through half-closed eyes. If he fell asleep, she would call. He would wake up with a jerk as the phone rang, sending it inadvertently over the ledge into the little courtyard below, forcing him to rush downstairs and search for it among the jasmine bushes. These small misfortunes might prevent a larger one: the possibility that she might not call at all.

  “The law of entropy,” he said to the phone. It glinted in the sun. Below him, the black-and-orange cat that had been hunting beetles in their courtyard for as long as he could remember came nipping across the baked ground, lifting her pink-soled paws high to cool them. When he called to her she gave an irritated warble and slunk beneath a jasmine bush.

  “Too hot for cat or man,” said Alif. He yawned and tasted metal. The air was thick and oily, like the exhalation of some great machine. It invaded rather than relieved the lungs, and in combination with the heat produced an instinctive panic. Intisar once told him that the City hates her inhabitants and tries to suffocate them. She—for Intisar insisted the City was female—remembers a time when purer thoughts bred purer air: the reign of Sheikh Abdel Sabbour, who tried so valiantly to stave off the encroaching Europeans; the dawn of Jamat Al Basheera, the great university; and earlier, the summer courts of Pari-Nef, Onieri, Bes. She has had kinder names than the one she bears now. Islamized by a jinn-saint, or so the story goes, she sits at a crossroads between the earthly world and the Empty Quarter, the domain of ghouls and effrit who can take the shapes of beasts. If not for the blessings of the jinn-saint entombed beneath the mosque at Al Basheera, who heard the message of the Prophet and wept, the City might be as overrun with hidden folk as it is with tourists and oil men.

  I almost think you believe that, Alif had said to Intisar. Of course I believe it, said Intisar, the tomb is real enough.

  You can visit it on Fridays. The jinn-saint’s turban is sitting right on top.

  Sunlight began to fail in the west, across the ribbon of desert beyond the New Quarter. Alif pocketed his phone and climbed down out of the window. Once it was dark, perhaps, he would try again to reach her. Intisar had always preferred to meet at night. Society didn’t mind if you broke the rules; it only required you to acknowledge them. Meeting after dark showed a presence of mind. It suggested that you knew what you were doing went against the prevailing custom and had taken pains to avoid being caught. Intisar, noble and troubling, with her black hair and her dove-low voice, was worthy of this much discretion.

  Alif understood her desire for secrecy. He had spent so much time cloaked behind his screen name, a mere letter of the alphabet, that he no longer thought of himself as anything but an alif; a straight line, a wall. His given name fell flat in his ears now. The act of concealment had become more powerful than what it concealed. Knowing this, he had entertained Intisar’s need to keep their relationship a secret long after he himself had tired of the effort. If clandestine meetings fanned her love, so be it. He could wait another hour or two.

  The tart smell of rasam and rice drifted up through the open window. He would go down to the kitchen and eat—he had eaten nothing since breakfast. A knock on the other side of the wall, just behind his Robert Smith poster, stopped him on his way out the door. He bit his lip in frustration. Perhaps he could slip by undetected. But the knock was followed by a precise little series of taps: س ق ڣ ؟ She had heard him get down from the window, then. Sighing, Alif rapped twice on Robert Smith’s grainy black-and-white knee.

  Dina was already on the roof when he got there. She faced the sea, or what would be the sea if it were visible through the tangle of apartment buildings to the east.

  “What do you want?” Alif said.

  She turned and tilted her head, brows contracting in the slim vent of her face-veil.

  “To return your book,” she said, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.” He made an irritated gesture. “Give me the book then.”

  Dina reached into her robe and drew out a battered copy of The Golden Compass. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I thought?” she demande
d.

  “I don’t care. The English was probably too difficult for you.”

  “It was no such thing. I understood every word. This book—” she waved it in the air “—is full of pagan images. It’s dangerous.”

  “Don’t be ignorant. They’re metaphors. I told you you wouldn’t understand.”

  “Metaphors are dangerous. Calling something by a false name changes it, and metaphor is just a fancy way of calling something by a false name.”

  Alif snatched the book from her hand. There was a hiss of fabric as Dina tucked her chin, eyes disappearing beneath her lashes. Though he had not seen her face in nearly ten years, Alif knew she was pouting.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pressing the book to his chest, “I’m not feeling well today.”

  Dina was silent. Alif looked impatiently over her shoulder: he could see a section of the Old Quarter glimmering on a rise beyond the shoddy collection of residential neighborhoods around them. Intisar was somewhere within it, like a pearl embedded in one of the ancient mollusks the ghataseen sought along the beaches that kissed its walls. Perhaps she was working on her senior thesis, poring over books of early Islamic literature; perhaps she was taking a swim in the sandstone pool in the courtyard of her father’s villa. Perhaps she was thinking of him.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” said Dina. Alif blinked.

  “Say anything about what?” he asked.

  “Our maid overheard the neighbors talking in the souk yesterday. They said your mother is still secretly a Hindu. They claim they saw her buying puja candles from that shop in Nasser Street.”

  Alif stared at her, muscles working in his jaw. Abruptly he turned and walked across the dusty rooftop, past their satellite dishes and potted plants, and did not stop when Dina called him by his given name.

  * * *

  In the kitchen, his mother stood side by side with their maid, chopping green onions. Sweat stood out where the salwar kameez she wore exposed the first few vertebrae of her back.