Alif the Unseen (32 page)

“It’s so dark,” complained NewQuarter, shuffling out of the driver’s side.

“No it isn’t,” murmured Alif. He was overwhelmed by color: deep navy and purple in the sky; silver and black on the ground. “It’s not dark at all.”

“Where are we, at any rate?” asked Sheikh Bilal. He leaned on Alif’s shoulder with an arm that trembled. Alif wondered if he should interpret this as a sign that he could be
forgiven.

NewQuarter pulled off his head cloth and let it drop on the ground, running a hand through a crown of well-oiled dark hair.

“I believe we’re on the edge of the Empty Quarter,” he said.

“Merciful God. That far?” The sheikh turned in a slow circle, ogling the landscape.

“Uncle, that prison fronts the deep desert. They built it there on purpose, so that any idiot who managed to escape would die of thirst or exposure before he saw anything resembling
civilization.” NewQuarter kicked a rapidly deflating rear tire. “As we will doubtless do.”

“Have faith,” the sheikh said in a tone Alif could not identify.

NewQuarter made a derisive sound and jiggled his keys in the trunk of the car.

“Yes, faith. Here. I brought water and food. If we’re going to starve we’ll start starving tomorrow.” He lifted out a bottle of spring water and a cooler. Opening it, he
revealed grapes and oranges, flatbread rolled around slices of cured meat, and a brick of feta cheese quivering in an oil bath inside a Tupperware bowl.

Alif threw his arms around NewQuarter with a strangled yelp.

“Thank you,” he said. “A thousand thank you’s. You have no idea what—”

“Yes, you’re right, I don’t.” NewQuarter unhooked Alif’s arms and brushed at his robe. “It’s okay. I’ve never done anything really brave in my
life outside a computer. This seemed a good place to start.”

“But you’ve risked your life!”

NewQuarter looked surprised.

“
Akhi,
you’re a hero. There are a thousand dissidents and hacktivists in the City who would line up for a chance to meet you, let alone help you. Your arrest was all over
the news. State media called you a terrorist, of course, but it’s not like anybody believes what State says. Holing up in Al Basheera of all places—that was a master stroke. Claiming
our most famous mosque as a symbol against tyranny. Genius. Your Communist friends and your Islamist friends probably had tears in their eyes at the same time. Wonder if that’s ever happened
before.”

Alif flushed.

“I didn’t mean to do all that,” he said. “I was running away from a bunch of State agents on foot, and Basheera seemed like the safest place to go.”

NewQuarter raised an eyebrow.

“Well, it worked, at any rate. The whole City was talking about you for weeks. Since you disappeared, though, a lot of people assume you’re dead.”

Alif thought in horror of his mother.

“What? They do? What about my family?”

NewQuarter shrugged.

“Couldn’t tell you. I wasn’t sure you were alive myself. Had to pull a lot of strings to figure out where you were. It was really only luck that I found you at all.”

“How do you mean?”

NewQuarter began making a plate of bread, fruit, and cheese, squatting in the sand next to the open cooler.

“As it turns out, we’re sort of related,” he said. “Your father’s first wife comes from rather a good family. She’s my mother’s sister’s niece by
marriage. I guess that makes me kind of like your uncle. Just think—we’ve known one another by reputation for years and never knew how close we really were.”

Alif made a wry face. “But that—that’s twice removed from no blood relation at all. I thought you were going to tell me I was secretly the heir to the throne or
something.”

“Ha! You wish. No, all this means is that certain pieces of gossip came through my family that might not otherwise have reached me. My aunt’s niece by marriage was in hysterics,
worried that her husband, your father, would lose his position, or the family would have their assets seized by State or something. Because of the royal connection, neither of those things
happened, but it still gave me a good lead to go about tracking you down.”

Alif sat down in the chill sand, mulling over these pieces of information.

“What a happy coincidence,” he murmured.

“All things are named destiny,” said Sheikh Bilal, accepting the plate of food from NewQuarter. He tucked into it with evident relish, eyes half-shut, a dribble of oil seeping into
his beard. NewQuarter handed a similarly loaded plate to Alif. The scent of edible things made him light-headed. He popped a fragment of cheese into his mouth, letting it dissolve, the pungent
flavor spreading over his tongue. He felt giddy; the grinding despair that had beset him before NewQuarter’s appearance now seemed unreal. He had been liberated. He had the sense that
something profound had occurred, yet he had no words to attach to it. His senses, reawakening, were saturated with simple and immediate things: the scent of the air and the food, the vastness of
the landscape. Overwhelmed, he set his plate down and knelt with his forehead to the sand, breathing inarticulate thanks.

“What is he doing?” came NewQuarter’s voice.

“I believe he is attempting to pray,” said Sheikh Bilal.

“But he isn’t clean. He hasn’t performed the ablution or checked the direction of Mecca, or begun in the correct position.”

“My dear sir,” said the sheikh. “God likes catching His servants unprepared. The boy has set down what is obviously the first plate of food he has seen in a long while in order
to thank his Creator. There are few acts of piety more honest than that.”

“Or more ramshackle. You can see the man’s bones through his skin. I wish he would just eat and address his Creator when he’s clean and civilized.”

Alif heard the sheikh chuckle.

“I have had much experience with the unclean and uncivilized in the recent past. Shall I tell you what I discovered? I am not the state of my feet. I am not the dirt on my hands or the
hygiene of my private parts. If I were these things, I would not have been at liberty to pray at any time since my arrest. But I did pray, because I am not these things. In the end, I am not even
myself. I am a string of bones speaking the word
God
.”

Alif lifted his head and sat back down on the sand. Sheikh Bilal handed him his plate in one long, deliberate gesture, as though he had aged considerably, or was in great pain. Alif accepted it
with a pang of concern.

“They hurt you,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You’re angry at me.”

“Very.”

“I don’t know how to apologize.”

“You might start by telling me where that damnable book is. That’s what they were after.”

Alif rolled a grape between his fingers.

“I have no idea where the book is,” he said. “I don’t remember moving it after the computer melted down. There was a lot going on at once.”

“I’m sorry,” said NewQuarter. “What book is this?”

Alif and Sheikh Bilal glanced at one another.

“It’s called the
Alf Yeom,
” said Alif. “It was written by genies.”

NewQuarter snorted with laughter.

“They must really have roughed you up in there,” he said. “Jumped by the Hand for a book written by genies? You’re hallucinating.”

Alif shook his head.

“It’s real,” he said. “The Hand wanted it to create an entirely new programming method. The djinn think about knowledge in a different way than we do, so their books are
sort of like long sets of encoded metaphor and if you translate that methodology into the world of computing—”

“You’ve clearly gone mad,” said NewQuarter, munching on meat and flatbread. He looked at Alif with disdain. “The Hand’s been after you for years, just like
he’s been after all of us gray hats. We’re enemies of the State. It’s got nothing to do with any book.”

“But why now, NewQuarter? Why did he wait until now to strike? It was because I had something he wanted urgently—something he didn’t want anyone else to have, especially not
someone who could figure out what he intended to use it for.”

NewQuarter grinned.

“What’s funny?” asked Alif.

“You called me NewQuarter. I’ve never heard it spoken aloud before.”

“Well, your other name is too damn long.”

“Only to a peasant.” NewQuarter handed him more meat and cheese. “Keep eating. Let’s feast today and not think too hard about what’s to become of us when we are
either found by State or die of thirst.”

Getting to his feet, Alif looked out at the receding dunes. They seemed clean, innocuous, free of dirt and debris and malice—so unlike the landscape of the City. The low-hanging moon made
the horizon shimmer like glass. Yet Alif remembered his school-age geography lessons: there was no water for hundreds of miles in all directions save the City. The desert was as implacable as it
was beautiful, and it had claimed many lives. Or at least, many human lives.

“If this is the edge of the Empty Quarter,” he said, “in theory we should only have to wander into it for the djinn to find us.”

“Again with the djinn,” said NewQuarter, beginning to look nervous.

“Djinn is in the final verse of the Quran,” said Alif impatiently. “Don’t look at me like I’m nuts. You believe the Quran, don’t you?”

“Well, yes, but—just because there are djinn doesn’t mean one meets them in the street. They’re like—they’re simply—”

Alif got up and started wandering away. He remembered Dina’s admonishment the first time they met Vikram, and his own anger when she asked him why it was so hard for him to believe what he
wanted to believe. When it’s real it’s not fun anymore, he had said. When it’s real it’s scary.

It felt good to stretch his legs, to walk for more than a few steps in any direction. His stomach was reacting strangely to food after having gone so long without it, and protested; he wanted to
be far enough from Sheikh Bilal and NewQuarter so they wouldn’t see him if something embarrassing happened. He stopped at the lip of a small rise in the sand, where the earth fell away into a
depression glazed in darker, heavier sand. He felt like running but his heart leaped feebly at the idea; who knew but he might drop dead if he attempted it.

“I’m an old man,” he muttered to himself. Every sinew of his body felt stretched and used, as though the three-month stint in prison had aged him by decades. Only his mind
remained clear. He took several deep breaths of the clean, dim air and turned back toward the wreckage of NewQuarter’s car.

NewQuarter had lain down near the crumpled hood and thrown his head cloth over himself like a blanket.

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” he muttered when Alif approached. “I wasn’t expecting the day to end like this. If you can believe it, I thought we would all be
camped out at my flat in the Dahab District by now. This is what comes of being raised to believe that money can fix anything. Clearly I am a failure.”

“But very handy behind the wheel of a BMW.”

“Thanks. I suppose that’s something.”

Alif lay down a short distance away from NewQuarter, wriggling in the sand to create a body-shaped hollow. Sheikh Bilal was leaning against the still-warm corpse of the car, snoring gently. Alif
found himself succumbing to the silence of the place, a quiet so open and broad that it seemed almost to roar, as though it was not silence at all but music in some ancient inaudible key. His eyes
drifted shut and he slept without dreaming.

When he woke again, it was to Sheikh Bilal poking his shoulder.

“Hmm?” Alif rolled over, unsure of where he was.

“Look,” said the sheikh.

Alif opened his eyes. The sky was full of colored light: blue, white, reddish-gold. He began to breathe very fast, overcome by a joy that ached.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Dawn,” said the sheikh. “It’s the dawn.”

Though it was winter, and warm as opposed to hot, the sun quickly asserted its supremacy. There was no shade except that which they could make with their head cloths and a
little more lent by the shadow of the car. The dunes that had seemed unearthly at night became stark, the sand soft but unyielding, ready to mummify the unprepared and unwary.

“Isn’t there an entire Persian army lost out here somewhere?” joked NewQuarter at one point while he sorted through their provisions. His voice was brittle.

“They got lost in the Sahara,” said Alif. “Not here.” He squinted out at the dunes. The sky was reflected in the bowl of sand he had seen the previous night, creating a
near-perfect mirage. It appeared as a tiny, very blue lake, as real as the junked BMW behind him. He noticed that the other two avoided looking at it, as though the pressure of false hope made them
nervous.

“I think we’ve got enough water for two days,” said NewQuarter, “maybe three. I didn’t plan for this little expedition. I wonder if State will show up. We
can’t have gone that far off the main road.”

“I doubt even State could get anything smaller than a tank over those dunes without crashing,” said Sheikh Bilal. “Perhaps they can’t come at all. Perhaps they will
simply wait at the road to see if we appear, and if we don’t, assume we’ve perished.”

“A fair assumption,” said NewQuarter, digging in the cooler. He looked pale.

“Perhaps. I will choose to believe that our lives have been spared for a purpose, until I am proven wrong.” The sheikh held his head cloth out over his face, fanning himself with the
loose ends. Alif was encouraged by the color coming back into the older man’s cheeks.

“Not much purpose in dying slowly rather than quickly,” NewQuarter muttered, repacking the cooler in the trunk of the car.

Wandering toward the mirage, Alif considered their situation. He was not frightened or anxious; his fear of death had dulled during the weeks he had spent awaiting it. He thought about what
Vikram had said, about the Empty Quarter containing not just desert but a world turned sideways—the abode of the djinn. He had said it was difficult to get a human through intact. There was a
moment’s anxiety when Alif thought of Dina and the convert and wondered whether they had made it out alive, and if they had, where they were now. The thing in the prison had said that Vikram
was dead. Did it follow that the girls had died as well? That thought propelled him forward, and he slid down the embankment toward the illusion of blue.