Alif the Unseen Read online

  Three more shots hit the entrance of the store. Alif craned his neck: the white-robed detective was across the street, sighting down a pistol as calmly as if he was hailing a cab. He felt Dina struggle underneath him. She rolled, pushed him off and half-stood. Alif made a grab for her arm.

  “Don’t, don’t! Stay down!”

  His heart sank as another shot ended not in a crack but in a gasp, and Dina slumped back down to the ground. There was a noise like a feral animal—Alif thought he himself had made it until he saw a tawny shape dislodge itself from the air and knock the detective flat on his back. Shaking, he gathered Dina’s unresisting body and hid his face in the folds of her veil, whispering a prayer directed as much to her as to anything divine. He heard a man scream: a high, terrified gurgling sound, interrupted by the snapping of bone. The screaming ceased. Alif tightened his grip around Dina’s limp shoulders.

  “Come, children.” The voice was sinewy and sated. Alif felt something close around his neck—a set of talons smelling of blood and shit—and found himself wrenched forward, separated from Dina by main force. Then he was half-flying down the street, taking longer and longer steps until his feet no longer touched the ground at all.

  “Give me your arm.”

  “No! Leave me alone—”

  “Girl, listen to Vikram Uncle. That arm wants dressing. If you keep making this pious fuss I will break it off, dress it, and sew it back on.”

  There was a rustle of fabric. Alif struggled to sit and was immediately assaulted by nausea; with a groan, he lay back down. He neither knew or cared where he was. Turning his head, he saw Dina kneeling next to Vikram with her robe rolled up to her shoulder, exposing one red-brown arm: a bruised, bleeding bullet wound was visible halfway between her shoulder and her elbow. Relief flooded Alif ’s body, a sensation so intense that he momentarily forgot to be either nauseous or afraid. She lived. She had lived. His eyes stung.

  Vikram was holding a pair of tweezers between his long fingers and peering at Dina’s wound with an interest that was not absolutely wholesome.

  “You can scream,” he said, “It’s all right.”With no further introduction he plunged the tweezers into Dina’s arm. She slumped to one side, balling her hands into fists, but made no sound.

  “And there it is.”Vikram held up a bloodied bullet in the tweezers. “You see that? That is a piece of your robe clinging to it there. The bullet pulled it in. That would have festered and poisoned your blood.” He dropped the bullet into a saucepan sitting near his hyperextended knee. “Now we will clean it and stitch it up. You owe me your life, but your virginity will suffice.”

  “Try it and I’ll kill you,” muttered Alif.

  “Good God, it’s awake.” Contemptuous yellow eyes regarded him. “You’re threatening me? The girl here has more balls than you do. You’d have pissed yourself just now.”

  Alif sat up and swallowed hard to keep from vomiting. Dina looked at him blankly, eyes glassy with pain. They were back in Vikram’s tent, he realized, rosy now with light from several glass lanterns set around the base of the arch. He smelled woodsmoke somewhere close by. Vikram was bent on his task, swabbing Dina’s arm with a wad of white cotton like some demonic nurse. When he was finished he took a curved needle from a box that looked like a pencil case and threaded it.

  “This is the worst part,” he said. “I think ten stitches. That means twenty needle-pricks and some tugging. You really might scream.” There was a plaintive note in the last sentence.

  Alif looked away. Dina did scream, short panting yelps that made Alif tense in sympathy.

  “Little mud-made beni adam,” said Vikram, seemingly to himself, “Third-born little beni adam. Fragile as a fired clay pot, you are. You can look now, brother.”

  Alif glanced up: Dina’s arm was bound expertly in white linen. She tugged the sleeve of her robe down over it with a hand that shook.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “Why did you change your mind?” Alif tried to look at Vikram without fear. “Why did you come to help us?”

  Vikram half-smiled, jerking one side of his mouth to reveal a sharp incisor. “My sister says she knows you.”

  “Knows me?” Alif began to feel nervous. “I would remember meeting someone like her.”

  “I should think you would. She says you gave her shelter once during a sandstorm.”

  Alif stared stupidly at Vikram. He opened his mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again.

  “I’ve been through your things,” continued Vikram, putting away his instruments, “As it turns out, you’re mildly interesting. You didn’t tell me you had a copy of the Alf Yeom. There are almost none left in the seeing world. Humans aren’t supposed to have them. I assume this is one of the copies transcribed by those old Persian mystics? Naughty of you to be carrying one around this way. I could get you a very pretty price for it.”

  “You mean the book?”

  Vikram loped across the tent on all fours. He stopped in front of Alif and gave him a measuring look.

  “Are you saying you don’t know what this is?” He pulled Intisar’s book out of nowhere and tossed it in Alif ’s lap. “Strange, as someone seems to have annotated it for you.”

  Alif frowned, looking from the book to Vikram and back. He opened the manuscript gingerly and leafed through it: tucked between the pages were yellow post-its covered in Intisar’s neat, upright script.

  “These must be notes for her thesis research,” he murmured. “I don’t understand. The girl who sent me this told me she never wanted to see me again. Why would she give me something so valuable, especially if she needed it herself ?”

  Vikram tilted his head to one side in a raptorlike motion. “Perhaps she wanted to keep it out of someone else’s hands.”

  “I guess.” Alif held the book up to the light and began to read the first page.

  * * *

  The kingdom of Kashmir was heretofore governed by a king called Togrul. He had a son and a daughter who were the wonder of their time. The prince, called Farukhrus, or Happy Day, was a young hero, whose many virtues rendered him famous; and Farukhuaz, or Happy Pride, his sister, was a miracle of beauty. In short, this princess was so lovely, and at the same time so witty, that she charmed all the men who beheld her; but their love in the end proved fatal, for the greatest part of them lost their senses, or else fell into languishing and despair, which wasted them away insensibly.

  Nevertheless, the fame of her beauty spread through the East, so that it was soon heard at Kashmir that ambassadors from most courts of Asia were coming to demand the princess in marriage. But before their arrival she had a dream that made mankind odious to her: she dreamt that a stag, being taken in a snare, was delivered out of it by a hind; and that afterward, when the hind fell into the same snare, the stag, instead of assisting her, fled away. Farukhuaz, when she awoke, was struck with this dream, which she did not regard as the illusion of a wandering fancy, but believed that the great Kesaya, an idol worshipped at Kashmir, had interested herself in her fate, and would have her understand by these representations that all men are treacherous. They would return nothing but ingratitude for the tenderest affection of women.

  * * *

  “This is weird,” said Alif, skimming ahead. “After that the king asks Farukhuaz’s nurse to tell her stories that will encourage her to like men and accept one of those foreign princes. It’s just a bunch of old tales like the Thousand and One Nights.”

  Dina rose unsteadily and limped toward the mattress where Alif had been sitting. She lay down on it, curling into a fetal position with her wounded arm held tight against her chest.

  “What a rare idiot it is,” scoffed Vikram. “The Thousand and One Days is not just a bunch of old tales, little pimple. That title is no accident—this is the inverse, the overturning of the Nights. In it is contained all the parallel knowledge of my people, preserved for the benefit of future generations. This is not the work of human beings. This book was narrated b
y the jinn.”

  Chapter Six

  Alif insisted on hanging a bolt of cloth across the tent, dividing it into two rough rooms while Dina slept. He woke her from her doze to tell she could make herself comfortable; she agreed only after he promised not to leave her alone in the tent with Vikram. Alif retreated as she was taking off her shoes, letting the cloth fall behind him. Vikram was sitting in the opposite half of the tent with a thoughtful expression, flexing his bare, lightly furred toes.

  “If she’s not safe around you, I need to know,” said Alif. “I’ll be able to tell if you’re lying, even if you are a—a different sort of person.”

  “I have no intention of raping your friend,” Vikram said idly, looking out the tent flap at the shuttered marketplace, “If I had, I would have already.”

  Alif shuddered. Vikram seemed not to notice his revulsion, and lifted his nose as if scenting something in the violet night air.

  “You seem to know a lot about the Alf Yeom,” said Alif after a tentative silence.

  “Enough to price it for what it’s worth.”

  “What did you mean about parallel knowledge? What’s all this about jinn?”

  “Why should it matter to you? This is more talking than I’ve done in a month. I’m tired of moving my mouth around air instead of meat.”

  Alif ground his teeth in frustration. “I need to figure this out,” he said, “The girl I love could be in serious trouble. I have to find out why it was so important to her that I have this book, even though she was angry at me.”

  Vikram stretched out his legs and stood. “Perhaps she was worried about being discovered with it. Your censors only know how to do one thing to books.”

  Alif shook his head. “The censors don’t bother with fantasy books, especially old ones. They can’t understand them. They think it’s all kids’ stuff. They’d die if they knew what The Chronicles of Narnia were really about.”

  “Do you read many of these fantasy books, younger brother?”

  “They’re all I read.”

  “And do you understand them?”

  Alif looked up at Vikram sharply. The lower half of his body seemed less terrifying now; a confluence of man and animal familiar to some inherited memory from another age.

  “What is it with you and Dina,” he said, “It’s like you’ve formed a conspiracy to convince me I’m stupid. Or an atheist.”

  “You may be both, but that girl is neither. She saw me this afternoon when you were walking in the alley outside my tent. I was trying to sneak up on you. Most of the tribe of Adam can’t see us unless we give them permission, you know. The veil is too thick. When your kind walk in the Empty Quarter, all you see is desert.”

  “That’s because the Empty Quarter is a desert,” said Alif.

  “It is a desert, but it is also a world turned sideways. Jinn country.”

  “That’s just a myth.” Alif began to question the wisdom of spending the night in the company of such a person.

  “Myth, myth. Who are you to say? Have you ever been to the Empty Quarter?”

  “Of course not. Nobody goes there on purpose. There’s no water, no shelter. Not even the Bedouin go there.”

  “Well, there you are. If you’ve never been there, you can’t say you’ve never run into a jinn in the Empty Quarter. You can only say you’ve never not run into a jinn in the Empty Quarter.”

  “Okay, sure, fine, you’re right.”

  “Of course,” mused Vikram, oblivious to Alif ’s noncommittal demeanor, “there were days when the world was crawling with walis and prophets who could stare right at us, but that was a long time ago. Now it’s different. Now you are more interested in the veil between man and photon than the one between man and jinn.”

  “Good,” muttered Alif, becoming uncomfortable.

  “So you say, but you may think differently when you discover all roads of inquiry end in the same place.”

  “I’m not interested in your back alley pseudohikma. I need straight answers.”

  Vikram yipped—Alif assumed it was meant as a laugh—and walked out the tent flap.

  “That’s right, it has a backbone of sorts,” he heard Vikram say as he wandered into the dark. “A small one.”

  Alif listened to his footsteps recede along the alley.

  “Well?” came Vikram’s voice faintly on the breeze, “Are you coming or not?”

  Alif had to jog to catch up with Vikram, who had covered more distance than he would have thought possible for a man strolling at such a pace.

  “I don’t want to leave Dina alone,” he said when he reached Vikram’s elbow.

  “The girl is perfectly safe. Azalel will keep an eye on her—she’s lurking around here somewhere. She prefers to walk with the beasts, you know, at night.”

  Alif felt a burning desire to change the subject.

  “About your parallel knowledge. What did you mean by that?”

  “I mean that my race is older than yours—we think about the world differently, and we inhabit it at an angle. We remember the Foretime, when it was just us and the angels, and your tribe had not yet been created from earth and blood. So we tell stories differently. Oh, they might look the same on the outside, but they have meanings that are hidden from you, just as we ourselves are hidden.”

  Alif could already feel his interest flagging. It was like listening to the babbling of a madman in the marketplace; one feigned attention, then moved away as quickly as possible.

  “What does all this have to do with the Alf Yeom?” he asked.

  Vikram sighed.

  “Your kind was never meant to read the Alf Yeom,” he said. “You have your own stories and your own knowledge. You are seen, and we are hidden. That was the way of things ordained by God before He started the clock on this strange universe. But you beni adam are always messing with delicate things and transgressing boundaries. At some point hundreds of years ago, an unscrupulous member of my tribe allowed one of yours to transcribe the Alf Yeom—either under duress, or for a handsome favor, depending on which version you believe. Ever since then there have been copies floating around the seeing world. Many were lost over time, thought to be only, as you said, a bunch of old stories. But a few remain. That book you have is one of them.”

  Alif thought for a moment. A night-bird trilled morosely from a nearby hibiscus bush. They had wandered into the oldest part of the souk, silent now except for the occasional domestic sound of an animal in its berth.

  “So the stories aren’t just stories, is what you’re saying. They’re really secret knowledge disguised as stories.”

  “One could say that of all stories, younger brother.”

  “How do you know so much about this book, anyway?” asked Alif. He was nagged by the suspicion that Vikram was toying with him. “How do you know what these people were thinking?”

  Vikram’s teeth flashed in the dark. “I paid attention.”

  By silent consent they began circling back toward the tent. Alif ’s mind wandered to Princess Farukhuaz in a Kashmir he had never seen, full of palanquin-bearing elephants and men wearing brocade kurtas like the ones in Mughal miniatures. He tried to imagine a time when his parents’ marriage might have been seen as something perfectly natural, removing the dark hint of idolatry with which he had been born.

  “You don’t believe me,” observed Vikram.

  Alif flushed. “In what sense?”

  “You think I am an ordinary man who has gone a little mad. Well, that’s what I get spending so much time hanging around the periphery of the seeing world. There is danger in being seen as too real.”

  “I don’t think you’re ordinary,” said Alif with a nervous laugh. He did not know how to proceed. His limbs felt heavy, and the atmosphere was suffused with a sense of dislocation; his room and his bed and his computer seemed to be part of a world from which he had been cut off.

  Picked out by lamplight, Azalel’s shadow passed across the wall of the tent as Alif and Vikram approached. Alif
froze, possessed by an emphatic urge to avoid her, especially while her brother was present. Vikram brushed past him. He spoke a few words to Azalel in their own language, and she answered in kind, saying something that made Vikram chuckle. With relief, Alif watched Azalel’s shadow slide off the far end of the tent and disappear. He ducked inside. Vikram was cross-legged on the floor, combing his long hair with his fingers.

  “Skittish as a young monk!” he said as Alif approached.

  “Where’s my backpack?” asked Alif, ignoring him.

  Vikram produced it from inside his shepherd vest, where it could not possibly have fit, and let it drop on the floor. Alif knelt to unzip the bag: his netbook, wallet and smartphone were intact, but the two pairs of socks Dina had packed for him were unfolded, and the bag of dates had been liberally foraged-over. Alif made a face.

  Pulling out the netbook, he logged on and spent twenty minutes breaking into the nearest encrypted wifi network; the digital province of some New Quarter entrepreneur. The other grey hats who shared his cloud were online and in a panic: where had he been for the past two days? They had each been infected with a keystroke-logging program none of them had ever seen before—did he know what it meant?

  Alif felt sweat spring up on his forehead.

  “God damn it,” he muttered.

  “Hmm?”Vikram looked over at him, one eyebrow arched.

  “He’s found Tin Sari,” Alif said. An ache had begun in his temples. “He got it off of Intisar’s machine, of course, like Abdullah knew he would. He’s trying to figure out what it is and how to use it. He’s making a hash of it for now, but that will change.”

  Vikram snatched the netbook out of Alif ’s hands.

  “Plastic and electricity,” he said with a look of disgust, “This is how you people think you will ascend to the heavens. But if you climb too high, younger brother, the angels will ask you where you’re going.”

  “Give me that.” Alif struggled to take the netbook back from Vikram, who grinned and held on with two fingers.