Existence

by James Frey

  Before he’s fully shaken off sleep, Hilal is on his feet, a machete in each hand. They are his favorite weapons, deadly blades that feel like extensions of his limbs—of his very soul. The word hate is inscribed along the blade in his left hand. On the other, the word love.

  Hilal detests violence.

  But he is very, very good at it.

  He streaks into the common room, where four soldiers have cuffed the students and are pushing them into a line against the wall. Akil stands beside the soldiers, free. Abashed. Hilal, who sees into people so easily and sometimes too well, understands the situation immediately. Akil has betrayed them.

  “I’ll ask you once to set down your arms,” Hilal tells the soldiers, politely but firmly. “I invite you to leave this place. Now.” The soldiers whirl on him, but Hilal is already in motion, machetes slashing through the air. Gunfire echoes through the apartment, tears holes through the cheap plaster, but Hilal dances away from the bullets, ducks and spins and cuts down one soldier, slicing him from shoulder to hip. As he lashes a foot into the soft gut of a second, he slashes a bloody wound into the shoulder of the third, then spins, leaps over both of them, and lands hard on the fourth, knocking him to the floor.

  He doesn’t want to kill these men, but he will if he has to.

  “Retreat!” they’re crying to one another, as Hilal knocks one weapon after another out of their hands, kicking the guns across the room, disarming and disabling all but the first soldier, the one with the gaping wound in his chest.

  Hilal thinks him too bloody and beaten to be a threat, and so makes his mistake: he turns his back on the man.

  Doesn’t see him stagger to his feet, grab Rabiah around the neck, and put his gun to her head.

  “Drop the knives, or she dies.”

  “You think we’re scared of you, pig?” Rabiah struggles in his grasp, undaunted by the steel muzzle against her temple. “You think you can stop us? There are too many of us to stop.”

  “You said you wouldn’t hurt her,” Akil bleats.

  “Shut up.” The soldier is backing away with Rabiah. Hilal calculates the variables: the distance to the closest gun, the distance between his machetes and the soldier, the distance between the muzzle of the gun and Rabiah’s temple.

  He sets the machetes by his feet.

  He will not risk her life.

  “This one’s under arrest,” the soldier says, as his fellows join him in the doorway and back out of the apartment. “We’ll be back for the rest of you.”

  “You did this.” Dalila is pointing at Akil. “You turned on us, didn’t you? Told them what we were up to, where to find us?”

  Akil is crumpled on the floor, broken. “They threatened me. My family. You don’t understand.”

  “Bullshit,” snaps Farid, the one with the beard. “She didn’t want you, so you decided to punish her. And all of us. Simple as that.”

  Akil rises to his feet. “You’re all fools if you think you can win this. We’re not talking David and Goliath. This isn’t some storybook with a happy ending. This is the government. The army. And us—a bunch of kids who don’t even know how to fire a gun. You stay here and fight your stupid fight to the death, if that’s what you want to do. What I want to do is stay alive.”

  Hilal watches Akil walk out. No one stops him.

  Now Dalila turns to Hilal. “You—how did you do that?” she demands. “Take out all those soldiers?”

  “I think what she means is thank you,” Farid says.

  “No, I mean who the hell are you?”

  Hilal bows his head. “I am no one.”

  “I think you should go,” Dalila says.

  Farid whirls on her. “Are you kidding me? This guy is some kind of one-man army, and you want to throw him out? Hilal, tell us you’ve changed your mind, that you’ll join us.”

  “I—”

  “Are you mad?” Dalila shouts. “Now is not the time to be trusting strangers! After Akil?”

  “Akil is a worm,” Farid says. “This boy is . . . who knows what this boy is, but he’s obviously on our side.”

  Soon the room is filled with the noise of bickering, all of them seized with an opinion about what to do next, how to root out other potential traitors, whether to give in or fight harder, shout louder, press on.

  Hilal sees how essential Rabiah is to this movement, how her sure vision gave them cohesion; how they are lost without her.

  “What will happen to Rabiah?” he asks, his voice slicing through the clamor.

  They fall silent.

  “They’ll take her away to prison,” Dalila says softly. “There will be no trial. Or, if there is, it will be only for show. And once they’ve got her locked away, the things they’ll do to her—”

  “We won’t let that happen,” Farid says, resolutely. “We’ll get her out. We need her.”

  Their will is evident; Hilal believes they want to save their leader. He believes, even, that they will attempt it.

  And no doubt get themselves killed in the process.

  Hilal has already saved Rabiah’s life once: by Aksumite tradition, this makes her his responsibility—spiritually, she is now of his line.

  By dallying in Cairo another day, ascertaining where a certain political prisoner might be held, he’s only doing what he must. So he tells himself.

  He tells his master only that there have been unforeseen complications, and that he will return home, soon. As they speak on an unsecured line, Eben asks no follow-up questions. Perhaps this is for the best.

  He pinpoints Rabiah’s location with ease, bribing two soldiers with the American dollars he’s brought with him for emergencies. From there, Hilal stakes out the prison complex. Tora Prison is in South Cairo. It is divided into seven blocks, and holds activists and murderers alike. It costs him another handful of dollars to determine that Rabiah has been thrown in with a group of long-term inmates, all protesters against the government, some of whom have languished behind bars for years. He learns that Rabiah is guilty, as all the protesters are guilty, of violating a law forbidding groups larger than 10 from gathering in public spaces—and that it’s likely she will be made an example of. Her capture is a coup.

  He learns that the prison is guarded by tanks and machine-gun outposts and electrified barbed-wire gates and is thought to be impenetrable. It’s everything the antiquities museum wasn’t—but he’s come to this country with the tools and skills to break into any facility, no matter how secure. He’s prepared.

  Still . . . Hilal considers leaving the manuscript somewhere safe, beyond the prison grounds, just in case something unexpected happens, something beyond his control.

  He considers forgetting this plan entirely and returning home.

  This is surely what his master would want, and what Hilal has always been taught to do. Think of the big picture. Safeguard the whole of humanity. Stay out of other people’s fights; save himself for the final war.

  This is prudent; this is the Aksumite way.

  Rabiah may be his moral obligation, but she is also a stranger to him, one who knew the potential consequences of her actions when she took them, one with a devoted legion of followers who have far more reason than Hilal to risk themselves for her safety.

  But whenever Hilal thinks about leaving Cairo, he remembers the pain of leaving people behind. Of valuing his own life over the lives of others. He remembers the faces of his villagers, looking at him for succor, trusting him to be their champion.

  Eben would say that he has his own battle to fight, but who’s to say that this hypothetical future battle is any more important than Rabiah’s, which is real, which is now?

  You are, Eben would say, and maybe he would be right, because the misery of these people pales in comparison to the potential extermination of billions.

  Hilal can’t argue with the phantom voice of his master.

  But he can silence it.

  He can promise himself that this risk is low, that this cause is just, that he can as
sist Rabiah’s cause without endangering his own.

  That perhaps he can redeem the betrayals of his past by giving Rabiah and her people a future.

  He tucks the ancient book safely into his pack—logically, it might be safer left behind, but he can’t stand to let it out of his sight. The book calls to him, wants to be in his possession. And so it shall be. He tugs the pack onto his shoulders, and, when nightfall comes, circles the prison, finds the hole in its defenses, a shadowed sliver in sight of neither camera nor guard, and, applying adhesives to his hands and sneakers, scales the outer wall in 90 seconds flat.

  On the other side of the wall, he pulls out his hand-carved wooden blowgun, peers through its laser sight, and fires a dart into the man’s neck. The blow is nonlethal; Hilal prefers not to kill unless he has to. Within seconds, the neurotoxin has infiltrated the bloodstream, and the guard drops noiselessly to the ground. He will wake in a few hours with a blinding headache but no long-term ill effects, and no idea how close he’s come to death.

  Hilal proceeds.

  He fires darts at several more guards, taking them out efficiently, one by one. For the two security cameras he’s unable to avoid, he chooses a more low-tech solution, cracking the lenses with two well-aimed pebbles. He scales another wall, and disables the engine of a tank while the driver is distracted by her cell phone, yelling at her boyfriend about standing her up the night before. He makes his way deeper and deeper into the prison complex, aware with every step that he’s putting more distance—more walls, more bullets—between himself and safety.

  When he reaches the block where, according to his sources, Rabiah is being held, he surveys the two guards at the entrance, gauging his options. After a few minutes, one of them descends his guard tower and retreats into the shadows, unzipping his pants and relieving himself.

  Hilal sneaks up behind him and wraps an arm around his throat, squeezing like a vise. Thirty seconds later the man is unconscious, and in thirty more seconds Hilal has zipped himself into the ill-fitting uniform and looped the man’s pass card around his neck.

  He drags the body farther into the shadows, tucking it behind a Dumpster, but its absence will surely be noticed, sooner rather than later. Time is of the essence. To buy himself more of it, Hilal deploys a small electromagnetic dampening device that will disrupt any electrical or wireless signals in the immediate vicinity, so that even if the remaining guards do notice something awry, it will take a little extra effort for them to sound the alarm. He designed the device himself—sometimes, he told his master, a man needs more than pebbles.

  Keeping his head down, Hilal enters the prison block, using the pass card to unlock one bolted door after another. He encounters only a few guards along his way, and none of them take much note of the tall young man on a mission. From behind some of the cell doors, he hears screams of pain, pleas to stop, wordless howls that say the same thing, so many souls here needing rescue, but Hilal forces himself to keep going. He’s been taught to choose his battles.

  Rabiah’s cell is exactly where it’s supposed to be.

  She’s slumped on the filthy floor, head pressed to her knees, and doesn’t bother to look up when he lets himself in. “I told you, I don’t care what you do to me; I’m not turning on my people.”

  “I would never ask you to do that,” Hilal says gently.

  Rabiah looks up—and treats him to the most radiant smile Hilal has ever seen. It seems to warm the dingy cell, light the cold stone with a holy glow. This smile embodies the ancient truth that Hilal has struggled all his life to understand and share: that every human bears the touch of the divine.

  “How are you here?” Rabiah says in wonder. “How is this possible?”

  “I came for you,” Hilal says simply. “Anything is possible, if desired strongly enough.”

  “That’s not exactly an answer. But fine, forget the how—why are you here?” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Are you crazy? What if they catch you?”

  “Indeed,” Hilal says. “So we must do this quickly.”

  “Great, give it to me.”

  “Give you what?”

  “The message,” Rabiah says. “Didn’t they send along a message?”

  “They who?” Hilal asks, now thoroughly confused.

  “My people,” she says. “Or is it that they want information? There’s already a lot I can give you—the layout of the prison, the timing of the guard shifts, the names of the other prisoners, I’ve been keeping track of it all, I knew they’d find a way to make contact, I just didn’t think it would be—”

  Hilal holds up his hands to stop the flow of words. They’re gushing out of her like water from a burst pipe, and he tries to imagine what it must have been like for her here, hour after hour, forcing her words down and her lips shut, staying silent in the face of all inducement to talk. “No one sent a message. No one sent me,” he explains. “I’ve come on my own, to get you out of here. But we must go quickly!”

  “You’ve come to rescue me? You don’t even know me.”

  “I know enough,” Hilal says, because there’s no time to explain his tangle of motivations, the awe he feels for her and her commitment to her cause, the layers of guilt that have nothing to do with her, the responsibility he’s decided to take for her life, the concept of spiritual bloodlines, the war between his common sense and his need to stop standing on the sidelines and act, the way she is simultaneously alien to Hilal and utterly familiar. He too is a warrior; he too has devoted his life to a single cause with monastic intensity—but he has also trained himself in tolerance and equability, in holding fast to his inner peace when all about him is chaos, in keeping the world and its mess at a distance. Rabiah wallows in the mess, hungers for it, and, stranger though she is, Hilal reveres her a little for it.

  Rabiah shakes her head. “No. If you knew the first thing about me, you’d know I won’t go anywhere with you. I don’t need to be rescued. I don’t want to be rescued.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Clearly.” The smile is long gone, but if anything, she’s glowing even more brightly, lit from within by her own certainty. “I’ve done nothing wrong, and I won’t be a fugitive from my own home. I won’t live in exile, or in hiding. I can make a difference here. People will know my story. Even if I can’t speak, they will hear my voice.”

  “This makes no sense to me,” Hilal says. He’s learned things in his efforts to gain access to the prison; he’s heard rumors of the things that are done here, in the name of justice. He’s heard of people lost in this darkness who never find their way back to the light. He’s heard their screams.

  “Your people need you. What will they be without your leadership? How will your cause triumph without you there to fight for it?”

  “I’ll be fighting for it here, Hilal. And my people will continue on without me. The movement is bigger than any one voice. You haven’t been with us long enough to see that, but stick around and you will, I promise.”

  “And while they fight on, what will you do? There’s less dignity in martyrdom than you think. And more pain.”

  “Is that what your God would say?”

  Hilal knows the power of a story—the power of a sacrifice. It can echo down through the ages; it can change the world. But it can also be senseless. Purposeless. No story is worth this girl’s life.

  Rabiah lurches to her feet and crosses the distance between them. She takes his hands in her own. Hilal’s hands are his only pride—they’re beautiful. Flawless. He massages them daily with oils and tinctures, files each nail down to a smooth crescent moon, protects them from scars and calluses. The pristine stretch of soft skin is broken only by a small cross branded into the heel of his right hand. Rabiah rubs her thumb over its sharp lines and meets his eyes.

  “I have no intention of being a martyr, Hilal,” she says. They are strangers, but in this moment he feels as if he’s known her forever. As if, in some impossible way, they are one. “I intend to continue my fight. T
o make noise. Let them make an example of me—I intend to make an example of myself. I don’t intend to die, but . . . Is there nothing you would risk everything for, Hilal? Is there nothing you would die for, if it came to that?”

  It comes to Hilal as an epiphany, in the truest meaning of the word, comprehension blooming over him like a mushroom cloud.

  This fight is her Endgame.

  He has no choice but to let her Play.

  Hilal was six years old when he said good-bye to his parents and his brothers and sisters and began his new life: Scholarship. Training. Devotion to the ancient truth. Everything else, everything lesser, pared away.

  He was six years old when his master sat him down and told him the story of the Makers, who came from above to imbue humanity with a divine spark—and departed just as mysteriously and abruptly, leaving only a solemn promise to someday return.

  He was too young then to understand what he was agreeing to, but old enough to know what a promise meant—other than leaving behind everything he knew and loved. A Player was not meant to have personal connections. The Aksumite Player, Master Eben said, must belong to all, and to none.

  He must love humanity, but also be free of it.

  Every year, on his birthday, his master once again told him the story of the Makers from above, and again asked him, “Do you pledge your life to this cause? To fighting for the survival of the Aksumite line when Endgame comes? To fighting, every day, for the soul of humanity?”

  Every year, Hilal understood a little more, knew better what he was promising and what he was sacrificing, and every year, he bowed his head before his master and gave his solemn oath.

  Every year, until his 13th year, when his master asked him the question for the last time. This was the year that Hilal came of age—he was no longer a child. This was the year he became a man and a Player, and his oath would bind him for the rest of his days.

  They stood alone in the Church of the Covenant, and Hilal could feel the power of that most sacred object buried deep in the earth beneath them, the Ark of the Covenant, protected by the Aksumites for countless generations. To make a promise in the presence of the ark was to bind himself to divinity; this was a promise that would not, could not be broken.