The Labyrinth of Souls

by Nelson Lowhim

  Khalid takes out two plates, and shovels the eggs unto them. He throws them on the table, giving a slight jerk of his head and pointing at the forks, baguette, and salt and pepper on the table beside the plates. He tears the top quarter of the baguette off, a crunch echoes in the empty room, and he smells the broken off piece with his eyes closed.

  “You French?” I ask, not exactly who else besides a Frenchman would act so in love with a long piece of bread.

  “No,” he says, opening his eyes and smiling. “But I did live in Paris for a few years.”

  “Oh?” I ask. I notice, in his wary eye and seemingly tired acceptance of all personal ticks, some level of being well-traveled.

  “Yes. Before I returned home.”

  “And where’s that?” I ask, stabbing my eggs and tearing off a piece of the baguette. It does smell fresh and warm.

  He doesn’t answer, instead he quarter-moans as he bites into his baguette.

  I decide to let it be and ask more questions later. After all, there’s always the risk that he sees me as a potential undercover. Especially in this day and age. I sprinkle a pile of pepper and a dash of salt onto the eggs. They taste oddly metallic—steelish, even. I tear off more baguette to hide the taste as it appears to be worming its way into my mind and forcing my mouth to water.

  “Well?” he says as he pushes his plate aside.

  I’m only half done. I stare at his plate. I haven’t seen someone eat that fast since recruits just back from basic training. I look at him for a second. He’s sniffing another piece of the baguette. Downright making out with it. It’s very possible that he does have military training. And I’m not talking about monkey bars, tire drills, and breaking tiles in the desert sort of training. No, I’m talking about the good kind. And I wonder what about his time in France, and what seems to be his multilingual abilities. It is I who should be wary about he. It’s possible that all of this was a setup, that they are trying to find something more incriminating on me, and to do that they’ve sent someone who likes baguettes, speaks Arabic and other language—who else would speak so many languages but an intel agent?—and who appears to have some level of military training.

  My gut glows with warmth. Am I on to something? A lump grows in my throat. I’ll have to be careful, less trusting. Though it does seem far fetched for an informant to pull off a car bomb just to get on my good side. I can’t imagine any suits who would agree to that, nor could I imagine the meeting where such an item was approved. Of course, sometimes it’s my lack of imagination that hinders me in life.

  I raise one eyebrow as if to ask what was he talking about, and push more food into my mouth. “Well what?” I say after almost finishing my food, though I grab the last of the baguette—to hide the bad taste, as well as to make sure that he doesn’t molest any more of that bread.

  “What are your plans?” he says and pushes his palms together, fingers to his lips, acting like he has so much to say.

  “I’m not sure,” I say. That lump in my throat is growing. My voice almost cracks. And the heat has migrated to my heart. Pain from the night before filters back into my consciousness. I might be too old for this. What to say next? To not be suspected of being an informant and at the same time to assume that he’s an informant out to trap me? The heat migrates to my head. I might be too old for this. Aren’t the best revolutionaries are in their twenties?

  Khalid leans back and studies me some more.

  I grow nervous, fidget with my feet, and don’t know where exactly to put my hands. I stand up and look around. “Cups?”

  He seems perturbed that I’ve stood up. He points in the direction of the sink, though there’s nothing on the counter or around. I check inside the sink: dirty dishes that haven’t been washed, with mold growing on the edges with food. The stench is strong enough to make my eyes water. I check under the sink. There are some plastic cups, disposable, but they’re lying at the bottom of a moist and bleach ridden base. I pick up the cups and sniff them. Each stinks of bleach. I give up, stand up and, seeing that Khalid’s still frozen in the same state, put my mouth underneath the faucet and drink. It’s metallic, but it will do. I think on what to say next. I can’t tell him my next move, but I do want to find my wife. I return to my seat in across from Khalid.

  “Well?” he says.

  “I have to find my wife. What about you?”

  “No, did you find the cups?”

  “No.”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  “I got enough water,” I say.

  Silence. A siren, firetruck from the sound of the accompanying horns, blares by the building. “What are you going to do next?” I ask.

  “I’m not sure,” he says and leans back.

  “Is this your place?” I indicate around us.

  “No.” He seems sad and turns to examining his hands.

  I feel something in the air of the room shifting. Perhaps this man isn’t as powerful as I thought? “What did they have you for?”

  A long pause. Trucks drive by outside. Someone yells. It almost sounds like the woman from the previous night. I imagine her out there, looking for a lover. I smile.

  “You seem to have an ability to stay calm even in the best of times,” says Khalid.

  I didn’t expect that. “What do you mean?”

  He points at me. “We heard about you when they caught you. A big fish, they said.”

  I want to ask how they heard anything. How they got through those walls, but my ego is growing. It’s good to hear good things, unprompted, being said about you. “They said that?”

  He nods. “Said you wouldn’t break under that torture.”

  I watch him fiddle with his hands. For all the cool calm, I didn’t really notice this before, this nervous twitch of his. Something about it tells me he’s somewhat disappointed in himself.

  “I didn’t?” I say, wondering if this was true at all.

  “No.” He sounds more assured of this fact than I.

  Funny how that works: how people learn to take certain pieces of information as the absolute truth based on who says it, or how they say it; whilst other pieces of information do nothing of the sort for them: they dismiss them as if spat out from the devil’s mouth. It’s these odd traits that I once knew. It’s these traits of humanity that are used by intelligence agents, by propagandists, by advertisers. All in the name of marketing. And one more level of funnier to think of Goebbels and spies and admen mining humanity for all it’s worth. Not that I’m complaining.

  “How did you find all this out? I was in complete isolation. I couldn’t even talk to anyone.”

  He stares at me, then nods. “That’s how it was for all of us. Until we broke. Once that happened they would give us a chance to talk to the others who decided to talk as well.”

  Decided to. As if such a thing is a decision of the man being flayed. So he must think lowly of himself if he’s thinking this way. “You talked?” I say, though it doesn’t seem like the right thing to say.

  I see him flinch. Sad, this. He was once very stately, it’s easy to see that.

  “I did,” he says. His voice cracks.

  I look off. “It happens to all,” I say. “No one can hold out.”

  “I thought I could.”

  I let that once upon a time illusion hang in the air. I point at him. “And what were you in for?”

  “I was fighting against them. What else?”

  “Where?”

  A silence falls on the table.

  “And you don’t know what to do next?” I ask.

  “Do you?”

  “I need to find my wife.” A lump forms in my throat. My wife could have been killed in that car bomb. “Did you plan the car bomb?”

  “Yes. Last favor I was owed. And I have one more night here. Then it’s all me.”

  “They won’t take you out of the country?”

  “They?”

  “You’re Al Qaeda, aren’t you?”

  “In some ways.
”

  “They did the hit.”

  “They wanted to free some of their other men. Those men who wanted to tear apart the guard are with them.”

  “Did you approve of that?” I flinch as I remember the guard being ripped to pieces. Funny that thinking on that can be more horrendous than thinking of a bomb doing the same or worse.

  He shrugs. “He was a man who once tortured us all. Why have mercy for such a person?”

  I decide not to pursue this. More sirens in the distance. We both hold our breaths. “Can we see the news?” I say.

  Khalid grunts in a positive manner and walks out of the room. I clear the table, throwing the plates into the sink. My head’s not completely right; my hands tremble. I feel disgust. My skin or my soul feels raw and open to the world. There’s soap and a sponge next to the sink which smells of old dishes with a hint of the lemon scent that the dish soap advertises that it has. I squeeze it out, thinking on the next step. What do I do? Well I do need to see what they say. Perhaps they think I’m dead. Or at least think that I’m under the rubble, which will give me some time. Then I can find out if my wife’s alive. I rub the pan and the plates and silverware with the sponge, turning on the faucet and watching the clean water flowing forth. The remains of the eggs come off easily and slide down the drain. After I’m done scrubbing the plates, I rinse them and place them on the dish rack.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  I turn and see Khalid holding a laptop. “Not a problem, really.”

  “You were military, I’m guessing?”

  “Yes. How—”

  “Who else would clean without asking?” He grins—that stateliness is back. “You fought in Iraq or Afghanistan?”

  This piece of detective work doesn’t rub me the right way, but his boyish grin gets to me. “Iraq. You?”

  “Both. Many places.”

  I’m not sure what the second half means. He sits down with the laptop and beckons me over. It’s on the front page of New York’s premiere newspaper. The main picture is of the blast, as seen from street level. The slide continues until there’s a picture of a young woman screaming, her arm missing.

  Khalid shakes his head when he sees this. His eyes dart away from the screen. I’m not sure why.

  “Do they have any suspects?” I ask.

  He clicks on the main article. As he scrolls down I see the to be expected platitudes such as horrific act and the idyllic setting of the Upper West side has been blown to pieces.

  My heart drops as the screen rolls down to the next picture. There’s a picture taken from the web somewhere; me standing grim, maybe even angry. There are plenty of pictures of me smiling, but I imagine those wouldn’t be right.

  “It says you haven’t been found yet,” says Khalid, trying to sound helpful. It’s not lost on me that Khalid’s face or picture is no where to be seen.

  We scroll over to the comments and see the hatred from people trying to sound their most vitriolic or wise, but all calling for much the same thing: the death of all those involved.

  Khalid gets out and visits another site which has videos. One is a CCTV that captures the car bomb driving up. Then the flash and blacked out camera. A family was swept out of view. I feel sick. The video goes on to interview distraught people, everyone getting less and less distraught the further from the blast radius they are, until they aren’t distraught at all but simply looking for revenge.

  And in a flash my knees go weak. There’s my wife. Ex-wife says the caption. Talking to the camera, telling the world what a horrible person I am, a mistake to her, and how I should give myself up if I’m out there. The news lady comes back into focus saying that they could not confirm if I was alive or dead yet. The camera pans back into the destruction and that was it.

  “I am sorry,” Khalid says, closing out the laptop.

  “It’s fine.” I’m thinking on my ex-wife, out there, hating me. Now every look of love she ever shot my way is tainted with this vision.

  “How long?” Khalid asks.

  “Better part of a decade,” I say. My eyes well up, the baser me reacting now. I look up to the ceiling. A drab slab of concrete painted over with white paint that has now conceded to the elements of the room and has started to chip and create homes for cockroaches, which I see crawling in and out of the cracks.

  Is there anything for a man such as myself to do? What can I do? They’ve managed to eviscerate me. Very well, I might add. And even though I knew that they could always do this, I’ve never been certain until now. The pain is seeping from every cell in my muscles; like a virus it makes my marrow weak, my joints ache, and my mind gasps for air, for relief. That morning’s breakfast pushes up my throat.

  “It’s okay,” Khalid says and places a hand on my shoulder.

  “I know.”

  Khalid closes his eyes, still patting my shoulder, and starts out in a moan. But it’s not a moan. It’s a call for prayer. And the man sings it beautifully. Allahuakbar. and the prayer begins. My heart trembles. And I don’t believe in anyone’s God, but I know what’s real, and my relief is entirely real.

  When he stops, I’m better. I’m still thinking on my wife, her lips. The way she held me, kissed me. Quivered beneath me. Arched her back. And I realize that I still need to find her. That the video was a godsend for I know that she is alive. And I know that I will have my day in court in front of her. My spirits lift.

  A siren roars by. I hold my breath until it passes. Not that sitting here would have helped if it was a raid. My heart slows down. My face is out there. I need to see my wife. I shake my legs and pinch my arm.

  “We have to move. How much do you trust these men?” I ask.

  “I trust them wholly. They helped to set our escape up.”

  “But did they have anything to do with the bombing?”

  He stares at me for a second. Does he not trust me? Is he an agent? And what about him seems so familiar? I’m sure I’ve never seen him on TV. And I’m sure I’ve never chased him down in Iraq.

  “Well?”

  Khalid turns his head to the door where a large man with a limp and a dishdasha walks in. Except the man doesn’t look natural in that clothing. He doesn’t seem Arabic. Looks more like a local, and by that I mean a man of Caribbean descent. Dominican.

  “Ya gonna be here much longer? Hate to say it, but you gotta leave soon. Heat’s getting too much for us to handle.” He points at me. His thick Bronx accent is something else. “The Mosque starts prayer in an hour. Ya better leave before that.”

  The man leaves. I’m wondering where I could stay. “How sealed do you think they have the bridges and tunnels?”

  “Why?”

  I want to see air again. A shudder runs up me when I think about the labyrinth that is Mathews’ apartment. How I almost never got out, and how all that was like a nightmare and that thought it still feels like a nightmare I would rather have open skies above me then running around in some series of rat holes; I grow colder, there’s the memory of me lying down in the rubble looking up to see the sky above me; that had felt so sweet; I don’t want to go back in that tunnel. But it might be the only place for me. I’m also thinking about the robot, that may or may not be working for the people chasing me. I see that the laptop has a webcam and push it so that it doesn’t look at us.

  “What?”

  “They can see,” I say.

  Khalid looks at me like I’m crazy.

  I stare at my feet. I see the scabs and am grateful that they don’t hurt.

  “What was that man’s name?” I ask. This will not be a quick thing. This will take longer than ever. But I will find my wife and talk to her. I will find that book and share it with the world. If I’m crushed on the way there, so be it.

  Khalid looks at me. “Vargas.”

  “Good.”

  He disappears and I hear talking. Then he comes back, grinning. “We will have to get a disguise for you.”

  “Why?” I ask, even though I know that it’
s not important to know why, and even though I knew that I would need to do this.

  “They have checkpoints up. But getting there by car will be impossible.”

  “And the route we took yesterday?”

  “We can try. There’s no guarantee.”

  “But if we go as homeless men on the subway, stinky and dirty enough, people will leave us alone for the most part, won’t they?”

  He shrugs.

  I let out some air. “Then let’s go.”

  Khalid holds out a hand as if to stop me. “But first some chai before we leave.”

  I’m not sure why, as this seems like a waste of time, but I decide to let him have his way. He’s trembling, and I wonder if he’s scared of being caught again.

  I help him cook the chai. We boil the milk and tea leaves. I watch and stir the pot while he clangs about with some dishes. Vargas pokes his head in, and Khalid offers him some. He sits down on the table.

  I stir the teas leaves, watching the milk turn brown. Slowly the milk starts to froth. First one slice of it froths up, pushing tea leaves up then back under the surface. Then another side, then another until it’s four bubbling parts, tea leaves cycling in and out of the top and down the edges until the whole pot froths up. I turn it off and let it sit.

  Vargas is looking at us, but not with any real curiosity. He seems to be devoid of care.

  I stand across the table from him. “Do you have any weapons?”

  “Do you have any money?”

  “We’ll pay you back.”

  He snorts and laughs. “Right.”

  I look over to Khalid. Who flinches like he heard, but doesn’t do anything else as he gets out the sieve and pours out the tea into cups.

  We all sit down and sip. My cup curdles at the top and I wipe off the cream. It’s cooked to perfection.

  “Good,” Vargas says.

  “Thank you.”

  I sip, wondering now why I’m going so slow.

  Vargas gulps the remains of his tea and stands up. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he says in a forced tone of properness. “Now get the fuck out of my place.”

  Khalid stands up, and makes to do something like clean up, but Vargas shakes his head. We go back to our room, Vargas watching, and we put on some charcoal makeup to make ourselves seem dirtier, and we put on the dirty homeless clothes. I can feel the grime where the clothes touch my skin.