The Mirage: A Novel (41 page)

The wooden gate opened. Umm Husam, Zinat, and Amal stepped through. Amal marched straight up to the militia leader, who still stood glowering amid the circle of corpses.

“Mr. Rumsfeld,” Amal said. “The mothers and daughters of Baghdad would like a word.”

T
HE
L
IBRARY OF
A
LEXANDRIA

A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE

Jinn

A
jinn
is a supernatural being. According to
Holy Quran
and
Hadith
, God created jinn from smokeless fire, as He created human beings from clay and
angels
from light. Like humans, jinn possess
free will
and thus are capable of both
sin
and
submission to God
: “There are among us some that are righteous, and some the contrary: We follow divergent paths.” (Quran chapter 72, verse 11)

Jinn occupy a
parallel universe
hidden from human eyes—though they can see us, and may choose or be compelled to reveal themselves. Evil jinn may be enslaved by human masters, while good jinn may volunteer their service. The nature and magnitude of their powers is disputed, but they can do nothing contrary to the
will of God
 . . .

JINN IN WESTERN MYTHOLOGY

In
Christian Europe
and the
Americas
, jinn are referred to as
genies.
The Western conception of the creatures comes primarily from adaptations of stories from
One Thousand and One Nights
, combined with elements of non-Arabic folklore such as the Greek myth of King Midas.

Western tales typically strip jinn of their
moral agency
, turning them into anthropomorphized wish-granting machines. The wishes invariably go wrong, resulting in tragedy or lasting humiliation for the wish-makers. Although commonly read as parables about the dangers of
hubris
, literary theorist
Edward Said
has argued that such genie stories also serve as propaganda reinforcing
Western authoritarianism
: “This message, that the natural order mustn’t be tampered with, encourages blind deference to one’s leaders—even as those same leaders show no compunction about imposing their own
magical thinking
on the world.”

T
he flight home left Andrews Air Force Base in the early evening. After takeoff, Mustafa rested his head against the window and watched America drop away over the horizon.

Amal was in the cargo bay, interviewing the prisoner. By default this should have been Mustafa’s job, but in his extreme annoyance at being apprehended, Donald Rumsfeld had revealed something he might better have kept secret: He spoke Arabic. Not well, and not willingly—but Amal had evinced a knack for goading him into talking and she’d wanted first crack at the interrogation.

The wounded Marine, Salim, was stretched out asleep in the rear of the passenger cabin. His presence on the flight was also Amal’s doing, although Mustafa, who’d been elsewhere when Amal and Umm Husam had spoken to Colonel Yunus, didn’t know the details.

Samir was sleeping too—or pretending to. Upon Mustafa’s return to the Green Zone, Samir had tried to quiz him about his meeting with the CIA director, but Mustafa had put him off, saying he could read about it in the official report. Samir was startled at first by Mustafa’s brusqueness, but then a sad understanding seemed to dawn in him and he nodded, saying, “Yes, perhaps that’s best . . . Perhaps that’s what I deserve.” Since then he’d been withdrawn and uncommunicative, keeping his head bowed during the ride to Andrews, his expression recalling the one he’d worn on the trip into the Red Zone: the look of a condemned man.

When it was too dark to see anything more outside, Mustafa sat up and got out the new reading packet that David Koresh had given him. It contained three artifacts, dispatches from beyond the mirage.

Item number one was a file from the archives of the Jihaz al Mukhabarat al Amma—the General Directorate of Intelligence of the Republic of Iraq—concerning an Iraqi National Police officer named Mustafa al Baghdadi. Mustafa had read it several times already, but now he began again, reviewing the details of his other life: a life recognizable in its broad strokes, yet bound and shaped by a very different set of constraints.

As in this world, he’d been a cop, trying to do good. But “good,” in the Republic of Saddam, was defined more by loyalty and submission to the Baath Party than by any normal measure of virtue. From a promising beginning—top marks in his class at the Baghdad police academy—he’d fallen swiftly. He was reprimanded repeatedly for being soft on suspects, using talk rather than more direct methods to obtain confessions and refusing to pursue cases against people he believed to be innocent. Then, in what should have been the end of his career, he’d attempted to arrest a Party official for the murder of a young girl. Mustafa had himself been arrested and held in Abu Ghraib for several months. Upon his release, he’d gone after the official again, this time turning up evidence not of murder, but of anti-government conspiracy—a much more serious crime. The official had been arrested by the Mukhabarat; Mustafa had received a personal commendation from Uncle Saddam, been restored to his former police rank, and warned to watch his step in the future. But the reprimands and brushes with Party authority continued.

The personal history ended in 2002, but attached to the file folder was a memorandum on United States Army stationery dated July 9, 2003. Written by a Captain Edward Lawrence, the memo requested that Mustafa al Baghdadi be cleared for work as a field translator, citing his strong language skills and “obvious anti-Baathist sentiment.” The memo said nothing about treasure-hunting in the desert, but given the proximity of Al Hillah to Baghdad, it wasn’t hard to imagine a scenario where Captain Lawrence and his translator, grown restless perhaps after several years of nation-building, decided to go off-mission. Mustafa also suspected—Koresh had hinted as much—that if he kept this artifact near him, he might start to remember details. He wondered if he really wanted to.

The section of the file marked
FAMILY
listed only one spouse, Fadwa bint Harith. Mustafa wasn’t surprised by this—he sensed that Saddam’s Iraq didn’t have many Internet IPOs, so an honest cop probably couldn’t afford more than one wife. What he didn’t know was whether that would have made him a kinder and more devoted husband, or a more bitter one. He wished he could believe it was the former.

The reading packet also contained a Mukhabarat file for Samir Nadim, another Baghdad cop who worked in the same precinct as Mustafa. Samir’s police career had been less rocky than Mustafa’s, though it appeared their friendship had gotten him into trouble on more than one occasion.

Like Mustafa, he’d had a second career, but not with the U.S. Army. From 1997 through 2002, Samir had been an informant for the Mudiriyat al Amn al Amma—the General Security Service, which, as best Mustafa could tell, was another arm of Saddam’s secret police force that ranked somewhere below the Mukhabarat but still well above the ordinary street cops.

Samir had not volunteered to be a spy. A report included in the file explained what had happened: After an unnamed source had accused him of meeting in secret with “subversive elements,” Samir had been placed under surveillance and followed on several late-night excursions to see whether the subversives in question were Kurds, Turks, Iranians, or dissident Iraqi Shia.

The answer, as the accompanying photographs showed all too clearly, was none of the above. The report concluded there was no treason here, but recommended that Samir and his fellow “subversives” be conscripted into the Amn’s informant network. “To avoid public exposure of their vice, we expect they will be most obedient.”

We expect they will be most obedient . . . Mustafa looked across the seatbacks to where Samir was once again tossing and turning in his sleep. He considered waking him, asking what his nightmare was about, asking some other questions too. Then he took another look at the photographs and decided that midair over the Atlantic wasn’t the right place to broach this subject.

The last, and lengthiest, of the items in the packet was an August 2001 report by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Bin Laden Issue Station titled
METHODS AND GOALS OF AL QAEDA
. David Koresh had affixed a Post-it note to the cover reading, “Not my CIA! . . . But a wicked prince in one world is a wicked prince in all worlds.” Mustafa turned to the first page and began to make some notes of his own.

At the Azores refueling stop, the harshly lit tarmac had the bleak look of a gas station after midnight. No one got on or off the plane. Mustafa used the lavatory in the passenger cabin, then went back to the cargo bay to check on how the interrogation was coming. He stayed out of sight at the top of the stairs and listened to the high whining voice of Donald Rumsfeld. The man’s accent was almost impenetrable; the only phrase Mustafa could make out was “majahil marufah”—“known unknowns”—which made no sense to him. But then Amal asked a follow-up question, her confident tone making it clear that she understood. Sensing he could only cause trouble by interrupting, Mustafa returned to his seat.

As the cargolifter taxied back onto the runway, he opened his wallet and took out the 250-dinar note. He studied Saddam’s smiling face and saw, in his mind’s eye, a stoppered brass bottle.

Known unknowns, Mustafa thought.

The sun reappeared as the cargolifter approached the North African coast. Mustafa was dozing, but the pink light reflecting off the seatback in front of him invaded his sleep.

In the dream, he was crossing the Sahara on foot. He had traveled a long way over a sea of sand dunes, but now the sea ended, giving way to a rocky plain that was pockmarked with blast craters. He knew without being told that this was Site Yarbu, the testing ground where the first atom bomb had been detonated, and where the military had continued setting off larger and more powerful devices throughout the 1950s and ’60s. Located in a remote part of southern Algeria, Yarbu was named for the hopping desert rodents that were, according to the government propaganda of the day, the only living things endangered by the bomb tests. Of course that hadn’t been true: Berber nomads occupied the fallout zone as well, as did a number of former French soldiers who’d remained in the Maghreb after the war. Comedians sometimes joked about this latter group, the
gerboises françaises
, Legionnaires who glowed in the dark.

Mustafa walked to the lip of one of the blast craters and looked down into it. It was surprisingly deep, so deep that its bottom was hidden in shadow. He wondered what kept it from filling up with sand, and in answer a wind devil started on the crater’s far rim, vacuuming up loose grit as it moved. In the waking world, the cargolifter banked to change course and Mustafa’s lolling head turned away from the window; in the dream, the wind devil circled the crater, gaining size and substance until it blotted out the sun.

Then Mustafa was walking again, through a haze of blowing sand. All about him was formlessness and void, but soon enough the sand began to condense into the trunks and crowns of eucalypti. He passed a sign:
REALITY REORGANIZATION TEST PLOT #99
.

In a clearing beyond the trees lay a hybrid shrine, an amalgam of Cairo’s Nasser Memorial and one of the monuments Mustafa had visited on his tour of the Green Zone. Shallow steps mounted to a platform on which burned a guttering Flame of Unity. Behind this, a half-circle of fluted marble columns supported a curved slab chiseled with the words
I TREMBLE FOR MY COUNTRY WHEN I REFLECT THAT GOD IS JUST
.

Another wind devil started, seizing hold of the Unity Flame and drawing it up into a twisting pillar of blue smokeless fire. Then the fire vanished, and in its place stood a figure in a white tunic whom Mustafa recognized from another dream.

“Hello again,” the jinn greeted him. “Have you sorted out your time zones yet?”

Mustafa held up the photo of the dig site. “Al Hillah,” he said. “I found your bottle.”

“Not mine,” said the jinn. “It belonged to a prince of Babylon. So did I, for a time.”

Mustafa heard a hiss of windblown sand and turned to find the eucalyptus forest transformed into a mighty metropolis, its skyline dominated by twin towers. New York, Mustafa thought, but already a second transformation had begun, changes cascading through the cityscape, turning it into Baghdad. And even though he watched it happen, once the transformation was complete and the Tigris and Euphrates towers were standing there so familiar, it was hard to imagine the scene had ever been different.

“Did I do this?” Mustafa said. “Was this my wish?”

The jinn seemed to ponder the question. “To remake the whole world would be an act of extraordinary pride. Does that sound like you?”

Mustafa looked at the photograph in his hand. “No,” he said, surprised by his own answer. “No, it sounds like something an American would do . . .”

“I must have a touch of American in me as well then,” the jinn said smiling. “To grant such a request. Ah, but I do love a challenge . . . And I was most grateful to be released from my confinement.”

“What did I wish for, then? If not this . . .”

“Smaller things,” the jinn said. “Harder things. Things I could not give you, grateful though I was.” He gestured towards the cityscape, and Mustafa saw, through windows that opened in the sides of the towers, Fadwa in two aspects. She was riding a crowded subway train; she was also, in a parallel reality, home alone, praying for the return of her husband, who had walked out after their latest argument. Then the planes flew in over Baghdad, and Fadwa looked up, and looked up, and was no more.

“I could not bring her back to you,” the jinn told Mustafa, whose cheeks were wet now with tears. “I tried, but God wouldn’t permit it. Not her. Considering some of those He did allow back, perhaps that’s a good sign . . .”