Alif the Unseen Read online

  “Look at you, you’re filthy. I barely recognized you. You’re going to get sand everywhere.”

  The cat sneezed again and shook herself.

  “You’d better not make any noise or the maid will come after you with a broom. And don’t pee on anything.” Alif pulled off the thobe he’d worn to bed and selected a black teeshirt from his wardrobe. After he was dressed he opened the door to retrieve the breakfast tray of flatbread, white cheese and tea the maid had left for him outside. The tea was now cold; Alif drank it in a single swallow. Squatting next to his computer tower, he pulled off the casing and examined the CPU. A thin film of dust covered the blades of the exhaust fan. He blew on it experimentally.

  “Not as bad as it could be,” he murmured. The cat rubbed her head against his leg. As he reinstalled the casing over the CPU, he heard an alarm chime out from his speakers.

  “Fuck. Fuck.” Alif darted into his desk chair and pounded on the space key until the computer monitor crackled to full resolution. His connection speed was dropping fast. Hollywood’s encryption software was reporting a string of errors.

  It was the Hand.

  Alif felt sweat break out on his upper lip. He forced himself to concentrate: he had to protect the people who depended on him. One by one he severed Hollywood’s connection with his clients’ computers—it would leave them exposed, but a few unprotected hours were better than certain discovery. His fingers seemed stiff and abominably slow. He cursed. Another alarm went off as the first of Hollywood’s firewalls was breached.

  “How, how, how?” Alif stared at the screen in awestricken panic. “How in all the names of God are you doing this?” Only four of his clients were still connected to his OS. OpenFist99, sever connection? Yes. TheRealHamada, sever connection? Yes. The Hand moved deeper into his system.

  “This is not possible,” he whispered.

  Jai_Pakistan, sever connection? Yes. Alif looked at his client list: the only machine still accessible was Intisar’s. He was running out of time.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “It’s not you they’re after.” He pulled the master plug out of the wall. With a whine, his computer went dark. Alif gazed at his vague reflection in the black screen, breathing in uneven gasps. He heard sand blowing against the window. Little satisfied sounds came from the cat, who had discovered the cheese on his breakfast tray. Time and the world slipped serenely forward as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. He shook his head to clear it. What had occurred? A series of timed electrical impulses, on-off on-off. That was all, and it might mean a prison cell for the rest of his life.

  Alif waited half an hour before turning on his system again. He ran three sets of diagnostics on Hollywood, whispering a prayer before each one: they returned no anomalies. Reconnecting his clients, he debated whether to send an email letting them know what had happened, and decided against it—what could they do but panic? He would find out how the Hand had managed to cut through his defenses, he would go through the code line by line if he had to.

  “I can fix this,” he murmured to the screen. A wave of nausea seized him. He leaned forward with a groan, pressing his forehead to the cool metal edge of his desk. Sand hissed around the house, aspirated like some deranged human voice, some haunted voice. Alif heard Dina turn on music in her room—a cheerful debke dance song—as though she too found the storm unsettling. He got out of his chair and curled up against the wall they shared. When his computer was on and connected to the grid, he never felt as though he was alone; there were millions of people in rooms like his, reaching toward each other in the same ways he did. Now that feeling of intimacy seemed fraudulent. He lived in an invented space, easily violated. He lived in his own mind.

  The cat padded up to him and put one sympathetic paw on his knee.

  * * *

  That night he dreamed of a woman with black-and-orange hair. She slipped into bed beside him, unselfconsciously naked, and comforted him in a language he had never heard. Her eyes shone in the dark. Alif responded to her without embarrassment or surprise, seeking her mouth and the hollow of her throat while she purred. She ran one hand along his thigh with a look of invitation. He was checked by a feeling of regret.

  “Intisar—” he said. The woman made an irritated noise and nipped his shoulder. Urgency overwhelmed him. He covered her slender form with his, shifting his hips as she threaded her legs around him. Delight stole over his body in waves. She cried out when his enthusiasm intensified. Bending to her ear, he whispered in the language she had spoken, telling her they had to be quiet, quiet; obediently, she stifled her moans in his neck. The end came quickly. Alif collapsed against the warm body beneath him, and the woman laughed, speaking a word of triumph. She kissed him with a fond smile. Alif begged her to tell him her name, but she was already receding into darkness, leaving behind a scent like warm fur.

  Alif woke to the sound of the cat batting her paw against the window. He felt sated and calm. The stormwinds were no longer audible, and the City beyond had descended into a deep, restorative silence. He rose, wincing; his calf muscles were sore. When he opened the window the cat blinked at him once and leapt down into the courtyard. He leaned out and took a breath. The air was purer now, stripped of pollution and heat by the sand. Dawn tempered the eastern horizon. He turned at the harsh sound of a metal hinge followed by feminine coughing: Dina pushed her own window outward, waving one hand to clear the dust that had accumulated on it in the storm. She wore a long green scarf and held it coquettishly over her face with her free hand, like a palace maiden from an old Egyptian film. The image charmed him.

  He called her name in a soft voice. She turned to look at him, surprised.

  “Oh! What are you doing awake?”

  “I had a—” he blushed. “I just woke up, that’s all.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, but not really.” He took another long breath. “I wish it was always like this. The air and the light.”

  “Me too.” She followed his gaze out over the City. The skyscrapers of the New Quarter looked as though they had been built out of pearl and ash. In a few hours workmen would come to clear the dust and return them to their glassy anonymity, but for now they looked like part of the desert, a natural extension of the great interior dunes.

  “Like a story,” Dina said, “Like a jinn city.”

  Alif chuckled. “Just like a jinn city,” he agreed.

  They stood in silence for a moment.

  “I’m going to pray fajr on the roof,” Dina said finally, “Be well.”

  “God grant you paradise,” said Alif. Dina’s eyes crinkled in a smile. Her window swung shut. Alif lingered for a minute longer, gathering his thoughts. He would shower and have some tea—there was no point in returning to bed with the day so limpid before him. Redoubling his defenses against the Hand would require all his skill; he might as well begin now, while he felt confident and clear-headed. He would not think about the possibilities that lay before him: at any time a knock might come on the door and reveal a pair of State security policemen in khaki uniforms. Or worse—they might not knock at all. They might appear in the middle of the night, and drag him, bound and hooded, to one of the unnamed political prisons that lay beyond the western edge of the City. Alif closed his eyes and banished the thought. He must not lose focus.

  Once clean and caffeinated, he sat at his desk and opened one of his code editing programs. Somewhere there must be an explanation for the swiftness with which the Hand entered his system; a weak or outmoded function in his firewalls, a flaw in his overall design. He wondered uneasily whether the attack had been a coincidence—the result of a roving audit—or targeted at himself. Was his name out in the open? There had been no warning; no chatter on the City’s mainframes about any captured grey hat cracking under torture and delivering up identities or locations. His clients were all as safe as he could make them up until the very moment the Hand appeared. No, Alif could not have been the intended target.


  “That almost makes it worse,” he said to his machine. If the attack was a coincidence, the Hand must be a magician to break through his defenses so effortlessly and with so little information. It was obscene, unbelievable. Alif knew no one with this level of skill. His own ability was childlike by comparison. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “There is always a way,” he said. “Know there is a way, and the way will present itself.” The words seemed naive as soon as he said them.

  He worked steadily until mid afternoon, reviewing and adjusting code with an attention to detail that was fanatical even by his own standards. He broke when the maid called him for lunch. Trudging downstairs, he found his mother seated at the kitchen table, washing a bowl of red lentils for the evening meal. She hummed a Bollywood song as she massaged them, sending cloudy trails of sediment up through the water.

  “Hi Mama.” He dropped a kiss on her head.

  “There’s saag paneer on the stove,” she said, “The maid cooked it specially for you. You still like saag paneer?”

  The question irked him. “Yes, I still like saag paneer.” He took a plate from the cupboard and helped himself.

  “Your father is in Jeddah,” continued his mother, “He sent me a photo on the computer. He is getting tan, out in the sun all day supervising the new natural gas pipeline. A shame to get so dark. I told him to put sunscreen.”

  “Good. Great.”

  “You should call him.”

  Alif snorted. “Why shouldn’t he call me?”

  “You know how busy he is. Better for you to call.”

  Alif bent to take a bite of saag paneer and studied his mother over the edge of his plate. She pushed the lentils back and forth, her face expressionless aside from a little crease of concentration in her forehead. Alif wondered whether the photo—a perfunctory snapshot of an absent husband; he could see it in his mind—depressed her. There were other photos, prints she kept in a sandalwood box in her room, that she had shown him when he was small. In these she and his father were always together, walking along the Old Quarter Wall or buying flowers from one of the stalls in the souk. She looked radiant: an adored, illicit second wife.

  Alif wondered at what point the thrill of the marriage had dimmed for his father. He suspected it was his birth. A problematic son with dark-skinned pagan blood in his lineage, the product of a union unsanctioned by his grandparents; impossible to wedge into good society. A daughter would have been preferable. If she was pretty and well-mannered, a daughter could marry up; a son could not. A son needed his own prospects.

  Alif heard his phone buzz upstairs.

  “I’ve got to get that,” he said, pushing his plate away. “Please tell the maid the saag was delicious.”

  He jogged to his room and picked up the phone: Abdullah’s number was flashing on the screen. He held it to his ear.

  “Yes?”

  “Alif-jan. I can’t talk. Can you come over?”

  Alif felt his heart rate spike. “What’s wrong?”

  “I just said I can’t talk,” said Abdullah impatiently, “Yalla, waiting for you.” He hung up. Alif shoved the phone in his pocket, cursing. He ransacked his cluttered room for a pair of shoes, pulled them on, and went out into the street.

  Abdullah was pacing back and forth across the interior of Radio Sheikh when Alif arrived. A young Arab man with bleached hair was with him.

  “Alif, thank God.” Abdullah crossed the room in two bounding steps and shook his hand. Alif curled his lip.

  “A handshake? What are we, third cousins? What’s going on?”

  “Never mind the handshake, I’m nervous, that’s all. Alif, this is Faris. Faris, tell him what you’ve just told me.”

  The Arab man looked around restlessly. “Are you sure he’s all right?” he asked.

  “All right? All right? My dear sahib, Alif has been with us since the beginning. It is vital that he be told.”

  Alif and Faris regarded one another, frowning.

  “Fine,” said Faris, “Here is the story: I work in the Ministry of Information.”

  “One of my moles,” Abdullah explained.

  “It’s low-level work—mostly I collate documents and answer the telephone. But on Tuesday I sat in on a meeting—”

  “With the Assistant Minister himself,” Abdullah said gleefully.

  “—and I heard something strange. There were two men from State security at this meeting. They talked about a carnivore program they use for their digital counterterrorism operations, and how successful it has been. They asked the minister to congratulate the man who designed it, and to thank him for spending so much of his own personal time administrating it.”

  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 are 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 rarified 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 teeshirt 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 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 turne
d. 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 said 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 email you if she wanted to give you something.”

  “She can’t email 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.