Alif the Unseen Page 15

  “Intisar.” Alif felt his face grow hot. She was menaced by so many things beyond his control. He had not done enough to protect her. The name falling star meant something to him, but he could not remember what. He was impotent, here as in the outside world; his utility confined to punching commands into computers. Beyond the bedroom where he sat day after day like an idle spider in the midst of a digital web, he was boneless, protected only by a black carapace of teeshirts and jeans, unprepared for physical danger. His mind struggled against the limits of his body.

  “She must have sent the book to me because she got scared,” he said, mortified when his voice shook. “Whoever this falling star guy is, he clearly threatened her. So she sent the book away to protect herself.” He gave a brittle laugh. “Though why she would think I could keep it safe is beyond me. I’ve fucked it up already, getting hacked by the Hand and going on the run. I have plenty of my own problems. I’ve been careless and stupid.”

  Sakina touched his foot with a sympathetic hand. Alif felt an immediate calm descend on his body, soporific and cool. He wondered if the effect was born of his own suggestible mind, or the result of some arcane ability the woman possessed. Either seemed possible.

  “Who is this man who wants it?” Alif asked her. “The book I mean. Where does he come from? Who are these people you say he’s recruited?”

  Sakina’s eyes flickered.

  “I have never seen him,” she said, “Though it’s said he came to the Alley on his own. No guide, no map. He has some kind of authority among humankind—an enforcer, a law-giver, a dealer of punishment. How he reached this place no one knows. But he was able to convince certain elements among our people to help him.”

  Alif looked at Vikram. The man seemed intent, even uneasy.

  “What does she mean?” he asked.

  “There are many kinds of jinn,” he said in a quiet voice. “As there are many kinds of beni Adam. Some good, like Sakina, some less good, like me. Most scuttling moral cowards, like you. But there are a few who are very, very bad indeed.”

  “As bad as—as what?”

  “Well, the outcast Shaytan is a jinn. From there you may elaborate.”

  Alif balled his fists against his face.

  “I can’t handle demons,” he muttered.

  “No you can’t,” said Sakina. “But no one has asked you to. Leave the book here with us. It’s safer in the Alley than it is in the seeing world. Your kind was never meant to possess it in the first place—you are too careless with your tools, too hungry for progress to consider its cost.”

  Alif looked with relief at the manuscript sitting between them. If he got rid of it, Intisar would be no less unsafe, but he would be a great deal safer indeed. It was an honorable thing, returning a lost artifact to its rightful owners. He would be able to look her in the eye and tell her he had done something, anything, to prove himself worthy of what she had withdrawn from him.

  “The man who came looking for the book,” said Alif. “He doesn’t know I’ve got it, does he? I mean, how could he? If I left it here, that would be the end of my part in this whole thing. I’m anonymous.”

  Sakina’s mouth quirked into a doubtful frown.

  “I’m not sure that’s true,” she said. “The man in question may be mud-made like the rest of your kind, but as I said, he is not without resources. His allies may already have informed him that you are here. And if he was able to reach the Alley on his own, he must have considerable access to information in the seeing world as well. If I were you, I would assume nothing.”

  The familiarity of the man’s name, kicking around in the back of his mind since Sakina had spoken it, came into chilly clarity.

  “My God,” said Alif. “It’s a meteor. A falling star is a meteor. Al Shehab. Al Shehab means falling star.”

  “So?”Vikram yawned, revealing too many pointed teeth.

  “It’s the Hand.” Alif felt like laughing. “His real name is Abbas Al Shehab. The Hand is coming for the Alf Yeom.”

  Chapter Eight

  Though Sakina urged him to stay, Alif bundled the manuscript back into his pack and slung it over one shoulder.

  “I’ve got to meet Intisar and warn her,” he said. “I should have left ages ago. I’ll be late.”

  “Allah, Allah!”Vikram exclaimed. “Yes, be manful! Take up your destiny!”

  “Don’t encourage him,” said Sakina. “He could be in terrible trouble.”

  “He’s already in terrible trouble. A little more won’t hurt.” said Vikram.

  “It’s true.” Alif gave them a wan smile. “It makes a lot more sense now. The Hand must already have known that Intisar was planning to smuggle the book to me when he broke into my computer. The attack was too surgical—I knew there was no way it could have been random. He was looking for something that would tell him whether I had received the book, or where I had stashed it. He doesn’t care about Intisar or about Tin Sari—he wants the Alf Yeom.”

  “Made it all up,” said the convert. Alif looked at her doubtfully.

  “I still think you should leave the book here with us,” said Sakina. “It would be wise.”

  “I don’t know if it’s wise or not, but if the Hand is mixed up with this book, I need to find out why. I’m responsible for a lot of people he could hurt.” With a pang of guilt, Alif thought of all the clients who had been exposed when he pulled the plug on Hollywood.

  “Very wise,” said the convert.

  “Can you take care of her?” Alif asked Vikram.

  Vikram pressed one hand over his heart. “Like my own eyes,” he said. “But where shall we meet you after your little tryst?”

  “I don’t know.” Alif flipped open his smartphone. No messages. He snapped it shut again. “Call me. The convert has my number, if you can get her to remember how to work a phone.”

  Vikram waved him off. “She’ll be fine once we get her back to the City proper,” he said. “The effect of this place wears off quickly. She’ll think we spent a charming afternoon in some corner of the Old Quarter she’s never seen before.”

  It occurred to Alif that he had no idea how to escape.

  “Where’s the, uh—exit?”

  Sakina shrugged. “Back the way you came, I imagine,” she said. “Vikram will guide you if you can’t make out the way yourself. I can look after your friend until he returns. But remember that whatever entrance you used will probably spit you out in a different spot than where you entered.”

  “How different? Middle of Tibet different?”

  “Difficult to say.”

  Alif looked dubiously at Vikram.

  “That’s it? Difficult to say? You don’t have some kind of cryptic advice?”

  “None,” said Vikram, in a voice with more forced cheer than was natural. “If Sakina is right about the kind of folk the Hand has recruited, you’ve got much more to worry about than a little detour. Gather your things.”

  Alif elected not to think too hard about Vikram’s warning. He saluted Sakina, who pressed a hand to her heart, and turned on his heel, trotting briskly to keep up with Vikram as he ducked into the street. Men and women and things in between stared at him as he followed in the wake of Vikram’s swaying dark hair. The colors of buildings and clothing seemed over-bright. Alif ’s feet began to drag. He felt sluggish as he skirted a messenger boy with an enormous jar of butterflies riding on his head.

  “You’re losing the narrative of things,” came Vikram’s voice. “Here—take hold of me.”

  Dutifully, Alif reached for his arm. His fingers brushed something warm and soft, like the pelt of an animal. For a moment, sleep descended over him, and he couldn’t see.

  “Cousin. Last-born. This won’t do.”

  Alif felt himself lifted like a baby and cradled against a furred, feral-smelling shoulder. He resisted a long-buried urge to suck his thumb, roused by the memory of a time when the darkness at the edge of sleep was peopled with beasts.

  “Wake.” Vikram’s voice w
as low and urgent. “You aren’t safe.”

  Alif forced his eyes open. Half-shadowed figures stared at him with eyes like lamps. An elephant lumbered past, her painted face scarcely clearing the saffron-colored shades of the shopfronts. He came fully awake and struggled out of Vikram’s grip, feeling overwhelmed.

  “You don’t have to do this,” he said, tugging at his rumpled shirt. “You don’t have to hang around if it’s really going to get as bad as Sakina says. God. All I did was let a cat wait out a sandstorm in my room. A normal person would kill me for sleeping with his sister.”

  “Normal people must not love their sisters as much as I do.” Vikram’s face had regained its usual expression of contempt. “What an ungrateful little creature it is.” He spun on his foot and continued down the Alley, so fast that Alif nearly lost sight of him.

  “Wait—I didn’t mean it.” He ran to catch up. The sight of a girl with silver chains looped through piercings scattered across her face arrested him, and he stared; she looked back and smiled, revealing a row of pointed teeth. Horrified, Alif ran on. The near-invisible staircase came into view, detectable only as a sudden collapse of the near horizon. Vikram paced in front of it like a restless lion.

  “Normal people,” he muttered to himself. “Idiot. After I’ve done everything but swaddle it in linens when it shits.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alif guiltily. “It’s just that I don’t know what to do. This place is so funny and bright—it hurts my eyes. I can’t think. I’m freaking out.”

  “Your eyes, your eyes. Better leave before something else offends them. There are the stairs.”Vikram’s head seemed to sink below his shoulders as he stalked back toward the main thoroughfare of the Alley, until he resembled something ghoulish and obscene. Growling noises of complaint issued from his retreating form. Dazed, Alif watched him for several moments before steeling himself for action. He sprinted back and caught Vikram by the shoulder. The man turned with a snarl. Awkwardly, Alif kissed him on both cheeks, as he would a brother.

  “I meant to say thank you,” he said. “That was what I meant to say.”

  Bewilderment spread over Vikram’s face, quickly replaced by a careless smile.

  “Go away, younger brother,” he said, walking a little straighter. “I’ll see you later, God willing.”

  Alif hurried back toward the hidden staircase, hearing the noise of the Alley die away behind him. Squaring his shoulders, he climbed to the top, and soon enough found himself jogging along the narrow passageway between the limestone walls of the Old Quarter garden where he had started out.

  When an opening failed to materialize, Alif told himself not to panic. He slowed his steps. Reaching out one hand, he ran his fingers along the chalky stones as he walked past, like a blind man taking his bearings. One block passed, and then another. Finally his fingertips fell away into empty air. Turning, he squinted: the barest shadow informed him that here, too, was a nearly undetectable gap, where the wall became two overlapping walls. He threaded his way through, and in a few steps found himself on an unpaved street, choking on the smoke of burning garbage.

  “Damn it,” he muttered. “Damn it all.” He wheeled in a circle, trying to determine where he was. Behind him loomed a concrete wall—intact and without interruption when he put his hand to it—against which were built a series of shabby lean-tos. Barefoot men in the uniforms of the City garbage disposal service were throwing sacks of trash on to a smoking pyre in the middle of the road, heedless of the Datsun mini-trucks that tried to pass. Women, barefoot and up to their ankles in mire, waded through a second, as yet undisposed pile of garbage, picking up reusable fragments of glass and plastic with their fingers. The stench was terrible.

  “Uncle,” he called to the nearest man, an elderly fellow with a stoop and a thatch of yellowing white hair. “What district is this? Where can I get a taxi?”

  The man smacked at what remained of his teeth, cackling a little.

  “No proper district at all,” he said. “We just call it the Place of Trash. Where do you need to go?”

  “The Old Quarter,” said Alif, looking desperately up and down the street for the black-and-white glimmer of a cab.

  “That’s a ways. I’ll take you there myself for thirty dinars.”

  Alif glanced at the man’s unshod feet, feeling skeptical.

  “In what?” he asked.

  “Apricot.” The man pointed to a donkey cart hitched to a disagreeable-looking animal, presumably Apricot herself.

  Alif bit his lip in despair. He would be late.

  “Fine,” he said, throwing up his hands, “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Alif arrived at the Old Quarter Wall, thoroughly polluted by the dueling scents of refuse and donkey. He paid the driver in a rush, hurrying away before the old man’s gnarled hand had a chance to close completely over Alif ’s crumpled bills. Sprinting up the stone-flagged road that led toward the university and the heart of the Old Quarter, he did not pause for breath, thinking with each footfall of Intisar. The memory of her perfume was so intense that he believed he could smell it over Apricot’s more insistent odor. He ducked left down a down a side street toward the university entrance. Students were leaving their afternoon classes in talkative groups, taking out cell phones and cigarettes and stowing notebooks in their messenger bags. To Alif, they seemed unnaturally relaxed, unaware of the impending disaster he felt hovering all around him, marking him as a doomed, unfortunate, foolish man, who had taken on burdens he had no hope of discharging.

  In the distance, Alif could hear the chaiwalla’s voice over the babble of students, his song punctuating their academic jargon. Sweet milk tea, joy for the tongue and health for the body; when you consider that Foucault defined the postmodern discourse, consider also his own experiential bias; sweet milk tea, if it runs out, I can’t be blamed; obviously you believe social capital will eventually have a market value; sweet milk tea, a heavenly drink for a worldly price; you suffer from the colonized mind, dude. The last was from a boy who looked desi but wore cargo pants and a teeshirt advertising some floppy-haired western band. Alif brushed past him, following the chaiwalla’s cry.

  Intisar was not there when he arrived. He bought a cup of tea and tipped the chaiwalla excessively. While drinking it—hot, soupy with ground-up spices—he wondered if she might not come at all. She did not check her email as frequently as he did. She might be afraid to see him. Perhaps she enjoyed being so capricious, rejecting him one day, sending him dangerous artifacts the next. It was for her that he had put himself and his friends in danger, for her that he had written the program that could send them all to prison. And she remained maddeningly aloof.

  When he tried to rehearse what he would say, two separate scenes played themselves out in his mind: in one, he shouted accusations; in the other, he took her in his arms. Both ended with Intisar trembling against his shoulder, apologizing and professing her unbroken love. He drank the rest of his tea too fast and felt his stomach protest. He must not hope; the hope alone would kill him.

  Alif shook his head to clear it and willed his innards to settle. The afternoon was getting hotter; the sun approaching its most unforgiving angle. A man had wandered up to the chaiwalla from around a corner. He ordered tea and paid with a small bill, waving his hand when the chaiwalla offered him change. Turning away, he discreetly dumped the hot liquid on the ground. Alif tensed. Two more men, trying too hard to look nonchalant, approached from the cobbled street that ran up to the campus entrance. One of them reached for something buckled into his belt.

  Alif did not wait to see what they would do. Throwing his empty cup on the ground, he bolted past the chaiwalla’s cart. Voices followed him, ordering him to stop and put up his hands. He did neither. Gulping air into his lungs, he sprinted toward an alley that led between the edge of campus and the closest private house. It was narrow—didn’t Amitabh Bachchan escape into a narrow alley in Sholay?—and they would have to follow single fi
le. He clattered past a splintered pile of boards, the detritus of a construction project, and prayed a loose nail would find its way into one of his pursuers’ feet. Alif ’s own feet smarted—he was not used to exercise. Gasping, he emerged out the other end of the alley.

  The street on which he found himself was broad and genteel, its stone-flagged surface recently washed. It sloped upward toward the heart of the Old Quarter. Squinting along its length, Alif saw the outline of the great mosque of Al Basheera against a white sky, fronting the original, medieval campus of the university. Alif scrambled up the street, legs aching, with a wild idea of seeking sanctuary. Surely they could not drag him out of Al Basheera in handcuffs. His phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it, continuing along the punishing incline toward the top of the hill. Footsteps rang against the stone behind him, and shouts: a man’s voice called for backup. Alif blinked back tears of frustration.

  “You! Boy! Why are you running?” At the gate of an ornate villa, the rotund, officious belly of a doorman blocked his path. By way of a uniform, the man wore a pseudo-Ottoman robe and feathered turban that gave him the air of a circus performer or a waiter at some touristy restaurant. The simulacrum was unbearable. Alif was seized by a desire to strike the man, or trip him, or plunge a foot into the soft underside of his enormous belly; anything to get him out of the way. But courtesy stopped him, and the doorman grabbed his arm.

  “Damn you to hell!” Alif shrieked, feeling betrayed. The doorman puffed out his cheeks. Alif struggled, but his abductor’s meaty hand tightened around his arm until Alif could feel his pulse. State agents were closing in behind them, sweat stains visible beneath the arms of their sport jackets.

  “Is this your life, dressing up like a monkey for a bunch of rich fucks?” Alif bellowed at the doorman, baring his teeth. “Is this your life? Is this your life? Do you think they’re going to stop treating you like shit if you turn me in?”