Alif the Unseen (10 page)

“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 two cans of Mecca Cola. He gave
one of each to Dina, then they threaded their 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
chaiwallah
.”

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 midafternoon before they found an arch like the one Nargis had 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 AK-47 lay casually on top of
a jerry can near the entrance. Alif hesitated.

“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.

“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 hold of 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’m 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 gray hats, I mean. Gray 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’m 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 through 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 and 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. Remember: ‘And the djinn We created in the Foretime 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 djinni trickery, and you were angry at me when I told you that made it dangerous! Why do you get mad when religion tells you
that 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 café a few blocks away and listened numbly as she ordered lentil soup, bread, and strong coffee. He obeyed when she coaxed him
to eat. The clientele of the café 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 bareheaded and barefaced, dressed for the autumn heat in linen slacks and T-shirts. 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 up 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 café and the coordinating flower arrangements on each table.

“Your djinn 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 café. A muezzin clearing his throat into a microphone echoed up the street from a nearby mosque and, from much
farther 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.”