Alif the Unseen Read online

  “Haraman,” he told her.

  “Gema’an inshallah,” she said. He felt foolish when she did not rebuke him for his failure to pray.They walked silently back through the souk, listing toward the harbor, where the smell of grilled fish and onions announced lunchtime from innumerable food stalls. When Dina suggested they eat before continuing their search, Alif made no protest. An uneasy sensation was building in his middle; a suspicion that he lacked both the will and the competence to see this plan through. He had prided himself on his knowledge of the City’s grey market, but the thought of a thug, a visceral criminal, made him feel inexperienced and effeminate. He had never held a gun, nor seen one except on television and once or twice in the hands of a border guard.

  Alif made a conscious effort to relax his brow and his mouth. When he was nervous he tended to purse his lips; it was a shortcoming Dina herself had identified. He felt her gaze on him now, studying his mood. He would not let her see his uncertainty. He couldn’t bear the thought of her familiar sharp sigh, the upcast eyes, the unspoken conclusion that he had once again behaved like a child and it was left to her to make things right. Alif lifted his chin and tried to appear confident.

  “Fish kebabs?” he asked her. “Or fish curry?”

  “Kebabs, please. They let the curry sit in the sun all day.”

  Alif approached the closest food stall, manned by a boy barely tall enough to fan his charcoal grill, and paid for two nicely charred skewers of red snapper and cans of Mecca Cola. Giving one of each to Dina, he threaded his way toward the dock that ran the length of the harbor. Boys and young men patrolled it restlessly, chucking stones at passing seagulls. Alif found space near an antiquated fishing boat and sat down, letting his legs hang over the edge toward the greenish, lapping sea.

  “Girls don’t sit at the dock.” Dina stood over him, shifting from one foot to the other.

  “There’s no law saying you can’t. If one of these donkeys gives you trouble I’ll smash him.”

  “How?”

  Alif looked up at her witheringly. Dina murmured something to herself and sat down at a polite distance, lifting the edge of her veil to tuck the kebab underneath. They ate without speaking, licking oil off their fingers, pausing to listen to the bells of the boats that came and went in the harbor. An acne-riddled boy sucked his teeth and moaned at Dina as he capered past; Alif threw a crumpled Mecca Cola can at his head. It caught the boy squarely under his buzz cut. He yelped but did not turn, careening onward down the dock.

  “Bastard desi dock boys,” shouted Alif, “You like making Indians look bad in front of these Arab shits? Do you?”

  The boy disappeared into the midday glare.

  “Are we all shits?” Dina wiped her hands on a napkin and stood.

  Alif waved one hand impatiently. “You know what I meant. Gulf Arabs and all that. Egyptians aren’t really Arabs, not in the same way. You’re imported labor, just like us.”

  “You’re partly an Arab too.”

  “Partly is the same as not at all. Can you see them hiring me at CityCom or the Royal Bank?”

  “Yes, as a chaiwalla.”

  Alif swatted at her ankles; she danced out of the way with a squeak. Hauling himself to his feet, Alif surveyed the harbor: a few fishing boats were bringing their catches home early, struggling in the heavy wake of an oil tanker that was putting out from the TransAtlas slip. He sucked the last of the fish from his skewer and tossed it into the water, where it gravitated toward a buoyant clot of trash. He didn’t want to go back to the souk. Dina swayed on her feet, looking philosophical, waiting for him to issue directions. “All right,” he said. “I guess this is really happening.”

  It was mid afternoon before they found an arch like the one Nargis described. It straddled a row of cloth vendors displaying moth-bitten bolts of cotton and linen, their hands stained with the dye they used to color their goods. The alley was oddly silent: few shoppers wandered past its stalls, giving the whole street a neglected, overlooked air. Alif felt the bile quicken in his stomach as he examined each stall, trying to decide which long-faced merchant might be sheltering a criminal, and how best to approach him.

  “Look.” Dina pointed to the left foot of the arch. A patchwork tent was set up against it, made from the same material the cloth vendors were selling. An AK47 lay casually on top of a jerry can near the entrance. Alif boggled.

  “I don’t want to do this,” he said, ceasing to care whether he looked like an idiot or not. “Let’s just forget it. This is crazy, and I can’t—I don’t know what to—”

  “I never wanted to do this in the first place,” said Dina, “But you said it was our only choice. We can’t just stand here.”

  They stared at the tent for several more minutes. Alif wondered what the unspeaking merchants in the cloth stalls were thinking as they looked at him. The silence in the alley was unnerving.

  “Go,” muttered Dina.

  Alif edged toward the tent as if approaching an undetonated bomb. He thought he saw movement within. He squinted: the shadow of a four-legged animal, a large dog perhaps, moved against the cloth barrier. He was about to draw Dina’s attention to it when he heard her scream.

  Alif spun around and was halted by blinding pain. He stumbled forward, dragged by an unseen hand, and saw the dirt alleyway rush toward his face. He flinched. When he opened his eyes again, he was tumbling over Dina into the tent.

  Chapter Five

  “Alif.”

  It was a male voice, smooth and low, touched by some untraceable accent. Alif struggled to focus. He put his hand down and felt coarse wool: a carpet, swimming with red and white designs. He blinked rapidly. Dina was somewhere to his left, breathing high panicked breaths. He flung out one arm with a vague idea of protecting her and heard a laugh.

  “She’s not in danger yet. Neither are you. Sit up and be a man, since you were man enough to come here.” A shadow moved in front of him. Alif saw yellow eyes in a handsome, raceless face, neither pale nor dark, framed by black hair as long as a woman’s.

  “V-v-” Alif ’s tongue felt heavy.

  “What a drooling mess you are. I didn’t even hit you that hard.” A hand reached out and took Alif ’s shirtfront, propping him up. He took a few deep breaths and felt his head begin to clear. The inside of the tent was decorated like those of the Bedouin: a round brass tray on a folding stand, a camp stove, a thin cotton mattress. There was also a stockpile of automatic weapons in one corner. Dina was clutching the hem of his pant leg unconsciously as she stared past him at their host.

  “V-Vikram?” Alif managed finally.

  George Bush. Santa Claus.”The man grinned, displaying a set of white teeth.

  “Are you going to hurt us?” Dina spoke in a wispy voice Alif barely recognized.

  “I might. I easily could. In fact, I may without even realizing.” The man shifted, and Alif noticed with horror that his knees seemed to bend the wrong way. He looked back at his face and attempted to forget.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “Sorry to bother you, Vikram sahib, I didn’t mean to offend you in any, any way—”

  “For God’s sake, listen to yourself. Your girl is losing respect for you as we speak. You came here to ask me for something. I will probably say no and you may or may not leave with all your limbs. So let’s get to it.”

  Alif forced himself to look the man steadily in the eyes. There was humor there; a predatory, unnerving humor, like the musing of a leopard in a pen of goats.

  “I am in serious trouble,” he said, “I’m just a programmer, and I can’t—I need someone who can protect me from the Hand. That’s what we call the chief censor. We grey hats, I mean. Grey hats are programmers who work for regular people instead of a company. You know? It’s a name we made up for him when we didn’t know whether it was a man or a program or both. I am in love with the woman he wants, and he found out, and he could put me behind the sun if he felt like it, I’d just disappear and you’d never see me again—”


  The man raised a hand.

  “I believe you. No one would come to me with a story so stupid unless it was true. But I’m not going to help. Number one because you can’t afford it, and number two because my help would get you into even bigger trouble. So out you go.”

  Alif looked at Dina. Dina looked faint. For a moment worry overwhelmed his desire to scramble out the tent flap.

  “Could she have some water first?” he asked.

  The man looked over his shoulder and shouted something in a language Alif didn’t recognize. A female voice answered from somewhere just outside. A moment later a woman entered holding a clay cup. She wore the layered robes of a tribeswoman from the south; a red scarf was looped over her head and face. She looked at Alif and gasped. Alif looked back uneasily, discomfited by the recognition in her golden eyes.

  “This is my sister Azalel,” said the man. “Of course, that’s not her real name—Vikram isn’t mine, either—but it’s as close as we can get in any tongue that you can speak.”

  “Alif isn’t my real name,” Alif volunteered, then cursed himself.

  “Yes, I know. Your girl told me while you were drooling on the floor. She also told me your given name, which was foolish. Never tell a man your given name if you don’t know his.”

  Azalel handed Dina the clay cup. Dina drank down its contents obediently and murmured her thanks.

  “Now you’d better leave,” said Vikram. “I haven’t eaten all day.”

  Alif did not stop to ponder this statement. Putting a hand under Dina’s elbow, he helped her to her feet. They hurried through the tent flap together and emerged gasping into the afternoon sun. By silent, mutual consent they half-trotted for several blocks before either of them spoke.

  “Did you see—did you see—” Dina struggled to catch her breath, as though she’d been running.

  “Are you all right? He didn’t hit you, did he?”

  “I don’t know.” Dina touched her forehead absently. “I thought I saw something awful, and I screamed, and then I was inside the tent. I think I may have fainted. You were lying there opening and closing your mouth like a fish. I was terrified that you might really be hurt.”

  Alif felt waves of gooseflesh travel up and down his arms. “We have to try not to panic,” he said, mostly to himself. “We have to try to think this through and process it. Break it down into its composite parts until it makes some kind of rational sense.”

  “Rational? Are you mad? That thing was not human!”

  “Of course he was human. What else could he be?”

  “You unbelievable child—did you see his legs?”

  The memory of Vikram’s leonine joints sprang to life behind Alif ’s eyes. He felt dizzy.

  “That could have been anything. The light inside the tent was strange. We were both upset. When you panic you start to think things that aren’t real.”

  Dina stopped walking and stared at him with knitted brows. “I can’t believe this. You read all those kuffar fantasy novels and yet you deny something straight out of a holy book.”

  Alif sat down on the concrete veranda of an apartment block. They had passed beyond the western edge of the souk into the outskirts of the New Quarter, and were walking down a trim, manicured residential street.

  “You’ve lost me. What am I denying. Instruct me in my religion.”

  “You don’t have to get snotty. ‘And the jinn We created in the fore-time from a smokeless fire’.”

  Alif got up again and continued down the street, suddenly angry. He heard Dina make a frustrated sound.

  “You lent me The Golden Compass! It’s full of jinni trickery, and you were angry at me when I told you that made it dangerous! Why do you get mad when religion tells you the things you want to be true are true?”

  “When it’s true, it’s not fun anymore. All right? When it’s true it’s scary.”

  “If you’re so afraid, don’t tell me to be rational. Fear isn’t rational.”

  “We can’t all be you, Dina. We’re not all saints.” Alif reached over one shoulder to take his smartphone out of his backpack, and discovered he wasn’t wearing it. He turned around and looked at Dina in horror.

  “The backpack,” he whispered.

  He let Dina lead him to an Anglo-Egyptian cafe a few blocks away, listening numbly as she ordered lentil soup, bread and strong coffee. He obeyed when she coaxed him to eat. The clientele of the cafe was a mixture of western expatriates and the desi professionals who imitated them, moving in the sunlit, sanitized canopy of the New Quarter rather than on the forest floor with their unskilled countrymen. Alif regarded them uneasily, feeling shabby and adrift without his tools, his ID cards, the few physical artifacts he had been able to carry with him into this strange exile.

  Dina was the only munaqaba in the place: the western women were bare-headed and bare-faced, dressed for the autumn heat in linen slacks and teeshirts. The desi engineers and architects were all men. Yet Dina seemed less uncomfortable than he felt, asking the waiter for more ice and an extra napkin with clipped coolness, tucking the folds of her black robe beneath her without embarrassment.

  “You’re not hot?” Alif asked her.

  “Are you kidding? It’s freezing in here. They must have the air conditioner turned down all the way.”

  Alif laughed soundlessly and leaned on his arms against the table. “You’re so brave,” he said, “It’s like you’re out shopping for the day. I’m about to collapse. He must have taken the pack when I was half-conscious. My netbook, Intisar’s book—everything that could possibly help us.”

  “I didn’t see him take anything,” said Dina, “But I was so frightened that I might have missed it.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Without internet access all I can do is run. Maybe I should just turn myself in and take my chances.”

  Dina shook her head emphatically. “You can’t do that. State Security will torture you and then dump your body in the harbor. You know how these things end.”

  Alif looked around at the elegant lemon-yellow walls of the cafe and the coordinating flower arrangements on each table.

  “Your jinn are real,” he said softly, “And this is the fiction.”

  He could feel her smile. She said nothing as she raised her hand to signal for the waiter and collect the check. Alif sighed when she paid it with her own money, having no other recourse but to sin against chivalry and let her. Dusk had begun to fall as they left the cafe. A muezzin clearing his throat into a microphone echoed up the street from a nearby mosque, and from much further away, the pleading melancholy call from Al Basheera was audible. One by one the mosques sent out their melodic demands, until the air was thick with sound: come to the prayer, come to the prayer.

  “We may have to sleep in a mosque tonight,” Alif observed.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to tell my parents,” said Dina, “I haven’t even checked my phone. I’m sure it’s full of terrified messages.”

  “Well don’t tell them you’re helping me—don’t tell them about Vikram either, or they’ll think you’ve lost your mind.”

  Dina fretted under her breath, producing a mobile phone from a pocket in her robe. They walked deeper into the residential outworks of the New Quarter, past condominiums and apartment buildings modeled on some architect’s fever dream of California, painted contrasting shades of salmon and sea green. This was territory Alif rarely visited. The City, Abdullah had once quipped, is divided into three parts: old money, new money and no money. It had never supported a middle class and had no ambition to do so—one was either a non-resident of Somewhere-istan, sending the bulk of one’s salary home to desperate relatives, or one was a scion of the oil boom. Though Alif came from new money on his father’s side, he only saw it in driblets. Baqara District felt closer to the truth of things than the pastel oasis around them.

  “I want to go home,” he said abruptly. “This whole thing is ridiculous. I’ll never take our second-rate street for granted again.”
Dina gave an unladylike little snort.

  A breeze had come up from the harbor, exactly timed, as it always was, with the trailing edge of sunset; Alif smelled salt and hot sand. He took a breath. They had to keep moving: he must find a safe place for them to spend the night. He hoped the mosques in the New Quarter, none of which were more than a decade old, were not so posh that they would go against the established custom and turn out travelers. Alif was following this thought into its contingencies when he noticed a man wearing a white thobe and sunglasses. It was odd, he mused, to see a man in sunglasses after dark. A moment later the realization kicked in.

  “Go,” he whispered to Dina, shepherding her around a corner, “Go go go.”

  “What is it?”

  “The detective from State.”

  She whimpered, then clapped a hand over her mouth, following Alif quickly down a street edged in hibiscus bushes. Alif didn’t dare look over his shoulder until they had gone several blocks and then doubled back. He paused in the recessed doorway of a women’s clothing store that had closed for the evening. Dina flowed in behind him like a shadow, pressing herself against the locked glass door. Alif peered out through a tangle of mannequin legs: there was no one on the street except for a janitor in a dusty uniform, sweeping out the entryway of an apartment building with a broom made of twigs.

  “Is he still there?” whispered Dina.

  “I think n—”

  A loud crack interrupted him. Glancing down, Alif saw a perfectly round hole in the cement facade of the shop, no more than a few centimeters from his left arm. Dina shrieked. Without thinking, he threw himself over her, tumbling to the ground as the glass display window behind them shattered. He felt her breath against his ear and the rise and fall of her chest, and for one vacant instant was pleasantly aroused.