Alif the Unseen (27 page)

“I will wait for you outside,” he said to Alif. “Plan your next actions very carefully.
As-salaamu alaykum
.”

The door closed behind him. Alif knelt at Dina’s feet.

“It’s so bright in my head,” he stuttered. “There are so many things I want to say but it’s so bright I can’t think—help me, please. You’re the
only one who knows what to do. Just—just make it less bright—”

Dina hesitated. Then she knelt in front of him, knee to knee, and threw her veil over his head.

* * *

The darkness soothed Alif’s dazzled eyes. After a moment his pupils adjusted, lessening the smarting pain in his head. He could not have guessed the world she had created
for herself. Sewn into the underside of her long outer cloak were patches of bright silk: patterned, beaded, spangled with points of light; they hung above him like a tent, supported by her bare,
bandaged arm. They lay on the floor facing one another. He rested his forehead in the curve of her neck, taking in the scent of her hair. She watched him. She was not beautiful, not by the measure
of the magazines hidden beneath his bed at home. Not like Intisar. Her nose was as large as he remembered. She was unfashionably dark, leading Alif to guess she had never bothered with the
skin-bleaching creams so many girls used to poison themselves. Of course she had not. She had pride.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I’m thinking that you are all good things in one place,” he said.

She blushed. Her mouth was tender, expressive, her red-brown skin unflawed. He realized with something like humility that her most striking feature had always been visible to him. The greenish,
upswept eyes, set against the palette of her flesh, were even more appealing now.

No, not beautiful, but a face that was not easily forgotten.

“I’ve been unfaithful to you,” he murmured. “Forgive me.”

“I forgive you.” The delightful mouth curved upward. He wanted to kiss it, but held back. He would not touch her until she permitted him, until he had spoken to her father and made
it all right. He had to take leave of her and go.

“Please stay alive,” she whispered.

“You, too. I’m coming back for you.”

“Say it again.”

“I’m coming back.”

* * *

Sheikh Bilal was waiting in the hallway with a grim expression. Vikram, like an oversized dog, lay panting at his feet, damp with clotted blood and sweat. He rose unsteadily
when Alif and Dina emerged.

“You go wait over there, little sister,” he said to Dina. “Keep the other one quiet. She’s gotten a bit hysterical.” The convert was
leaning against a wall farther down the corridor, whimpering. Dina gave Alif a searching look before turning to do as she was told. Alif watched her go with a dull ache in his throat.

“If you are ever cruel to her, I will come back and haunt you,” said Vikram. “Guard her like your own eyes. She is probably circumcised, which means you must be very patient
and very gentle when you take her to bed.”

“God forgive us, man!” Sheikh Bilal stared at Vikram in dismay. “At least leave this world with some manners.”

“I’m only telling the boy what he needs to know,” Vikram said sullenly. Alif put his arms around the broad, blurred shoulders, which shifted between man and animal and shadow
in a way that betrayed pain.

“Thank you,” he muttered, embarrassed by his own ragged affection. Vikram clapped him on the back with his good limb.

“Keep your wits sharpened, younger brother,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ll meet again in this life.”

Alif gave a curt nod, hoping his lip didn’t tremble.

“I’ll see you in the next, then.”

“God willing.”

Vikram limped down the hallway toward Dina and the convert, who stood watching him with clasped hands, as though waiting for a train that might not arrive. Alif looked away, sensing he could
somehow damage what was about to happen by observing it. He sent up a wordless prayer for Dina’s safety. As an afterthought, he prayed for the convert as well, with the uncharitable feeling
she needed it more.

“I am going to unbar the door,” said Sheikh Bilal, looking likewise away from the scene at the end of the hall. “I would take my hands out of my pockets if I were you. These
are the type of men who will never spend a day in jail for shooting you on sight.
Bismillah
.” He lifted the creased wooden bar from the door between the
musala
and the
classrooms and offices beyond it.

“Wait!” Alif called out. “What will happen to you? They wouldn’t shoot the imam of Al Basheera, would they?”

Sheikh Bilal snorted. “This will be an entertaining way to find out.”

Alif took his hands from his pockets and wiped them on his pants. The wooden door slid open, revealing two rows of riot police in full uniform, all of whom began to smash their batons against
their polycarbonate shields in a coordinated rhythm. Alif fought the urge to giggle. His nerves, shot and exhausted, couldn’t summon the chemical wherewithal for fear. He looked over his
shoulder: Vikram and the girls were gone. The only evidence of their passing was a thin trail of blood, smudged in several places by what looked like the footprints of a very large dog, footprints
that halted abruptly three feet before the stone wall at the end of the hallway.

Turning toward the police, Alif put his hands back in his pockets.

“Hi,” he said in English. The rows of men parted as three State security officials with handguns at their hips came rushing forward. Alif heard Sheikh Bilal shout. Before he could
look back at the old man, a baton came down on Alif’s skull. Pain shrieked through his head and neck. He brought up the contents of his stomach, gasping.

“Little faggot’s thrown up on my shoes!” The voice was fat and familiar. Alif recognized it as belonging to one of the men who had trailed him from the university.

“Stupid shit. I should make you lick it up. It’s the last meal you’ll have for a long time.”

“F-f—”

“What’s that?”

“F-fuck you.” Alif spat the remaining bile from his mouth. Then, suddenly, he couldn’t see. A black bag had descended over his eyes and the world collapsed into a flat void.

He awoke in darkness. Blinking revealed nothing: he could make out neither shapes nor depth nor any kind of light. Clawing at his face, he discovered the black bag was gone;
this darkness was something more complete. For a moment he thought he had been buried alive and shrieked, flailing his arms. He touched only air, and heard the shriek echo off of a wall some
distance away: not in a coffin, then. Was he blind? He rubbed his eyes experimentally and saw spots. This reassured him, but only for a moment; he realized he did not know what a blind person could
and could not perceive. Was it like seeing darkness, or was it the complete removal of all visual sense? The question kept him occupied for several haggard minutes. Fear had returned, fresh and
rested, and poured through his limbs in a stew of adrenaline.

Air on several sensitive parts of his body told him he was naked. He ran his hands down his torso and was relieved to find himself intact. His head was sore, and a painful exploration of his
scalp revealed the skin had split where the baton had met resistance. The cut had not been treated; it stung under his fingers. Blood was matted in his hair. He moved forward, shuffling his feet,
and reached out with both arms until he met a chilly wall. He followed it around several corners, coming at last to a hinge and an expanse of metal that might be a door. Pounding on it and shouting
yielded nothing. He slid to the ground with his back against the metal facade, succumbing to a loud, wet bout of weeping that left him exhausted.

When the tears stopped, he curled up on the floor facing the door. A tiny breeze touched his face, telling him there was a gap, small but existent, where the door met the ground. Try as he
might, he could divine no light from it. Either the space beyond the door was dark as well, or he truly was blind. The thought threatened to bring on fresh tears. He wanted Dina, he wanted her
consecrated darkness, so unlike this hostile absence of light. She was dark the way the hour before dawn was dark, a time ordained by God for prayer. He wanted the lemon scent of her hair and the
stars that glimmered in the secret interior of her veil. He thought of what she had risked by comforting him and was overcome by urgency; he knew her exasperating sense of decorum would not permit
her to take any other partner now that she had shown him her face. He had to return to her. He began pounding on the door again.

There was no answer. When his hands were raw he stopped and withdrew to the opposite side of the room, restlessly aware that he had created a third problem to go along with his wounded head and
blistered fingertips.

“I’m doomed,” he said to the unlistening air. The sound of his own voice startled him. He needed to urinate. Feeling his way along the wall, he halted at the first corner he
encountered. He deliberated for several moments before relieving himself into it, shuddering with humiliation. All the stories he had read online about the prisons of the western desert had seemed
so theoretical, a goad for his outrage against the government, not real in and of themselves. They were part of the fiction in which he lived. But there was nothing fictional about this room, no
tangible evil against which he could prove himself brave. There was only the stifling black silence, which amplified his thoughts in a way that stirred dread in the recesses of his mind.

He backed away from the corner, hoping he would remember which one it was to avoid stepping in his own mess. The air around him was growing uncomfortably warm. Was it daytime, then? There seemed
no better option than to try and sleep. Alif felt his way to the door again and lay lengthwise in front of it. The tiny draft it admitted was an iota cooler and fresher than the stuffy rebreathed
air inside the room. He took long, slow breaths of it, eyes closed, and willed himself to relax.

The speed with which he lost track of time alarmed him. When he woke he couldn’t tell whether he had slept for minutes or hours; making his way to the corner, which was going fetid in the
heat, he urinated again, and wondered whether the recurrence of this bodily function told him anything about how long he had been confined. He was getting thirsty. He tried to go back to sleep and
couldn’t. Lying awake, he wrote code in his mind, tapping out key sequences on the metal door to make a little noise. At some point, he drifted off again.

The sound that awoke him was difficult to identify. At first he thought it was steam escaping from somewhere, perhaps a vent or a pipe hidden in the ceiling. For a moment he was afraid they were
gassing him. But the sound was syncopated, irregular, halting at organic intervals and, after listening for some time, he realized with horror what precisely he was hearing.

It was laughter.

He searched wildly in the gloom for its source but the darkness was too thick to be certain of anything. Terrified, Alif began to pant, pressing his back against the door and drawing his knees
to his chest. The laughter grew louder. There was something familiar about it. Alif was possessed by a wild hope.

“Vikram?” he whispered.

The laughter stopped.

“No,” came a voice, hissing, neuter, disembodied. “Not he. You are not saved. Vikram is dead. Quite dead.”

“Who are you?” Alif’s voice broke on the last syllable. There was movement across the room, the dry noise of fabric being dragged along the ground.

“You don’t recognize me?” The voice drew closer. “After all that we built together. Alif.”

He heard the sound of small bells. The edge of something soft, like silk, slid across his foot. His head throbbed.

“Farukhuaz,” he breathed.

The laughter began again. Alif pressed his hands over his ears.

“You’re not real,” he said. “I made you up to help me finish the code—you’re a fantasy, you’re in my head—”

“I am very real,” said the voice from between the bones of Alif’s skull. “And I am also in your head.”

Alif ground his hands against his eyes until he saw spots once more.

“I could have made so much of you,” the voice continued, “if you’d let me. You were so close. A few minutes more and you would have pierced the veil of Heaven itself. All
things seen and unseen would have been laid bare in front of you.”

“It was the wrong way,” said Alif, pressing himself more tightly against the door. “It wouldn’t have worked. The code was too unstable.”

“You are afraid of your own power.” Alif felt a hand slip between his bare knees. He jerked away.

“It wouldn’t have worked,” he repeated. “It started to decay in front of my eyes. You saw it. The information had no integrity, no guiding principle. The whole project
was collapsing when the computer fused.”

“Coward,” said the voice. “Fake. You lacked the nerve to see it through.”

Alif struggled to escape Farukhuaz’s questing fingers. Shuddering currents of revulsion passed through him.

“Stop it,” he gasped. “Please stop.”

“What, not a man either? A little piglet.”

Alif lashed out at the void. His hands encountered cloth, trembling bells, and something awful, like slime; he cried out and fought with greater strength, shoving the viscous thing farther into
the darkness. It occurred to him to recite the
shahada
. The thing began to shriek. Encouraged, Alif bellowed every talismanic holy verse he knew, testifying to the oneness of God, the
indivisibility of His nature, the perfidy of Satan. The shriek rose to an unnatural decibel, rattling through the room in fading reverberations until it became indistinguishable from the tinnitus
inside his own ears.

Alif ran out of breath. Light flooded the room, sending arcs of pain through his already tender skull. He doubled over, shielding his face with a gasp.

“Babbling already? That doesn’t speak well of your fortitude. Get up.”

It was not Farukhuaz’s voice. Squinting, Alif peered toward the speaker: a man stood in the doorway, wearing a
thobe
so white Alif’s retinas ached to look at it. He was
tall, with a neatly trimmed goatee and a bearing that suggested long-held authority. Alif had trouble focusing, and could not guess the man’s age; tears seeped out when he held his eyes open
for more than a moment or two.