by Zoë Ferraris
With a sigh he let it go, and it wound like a single, frail cloud into the dark sky. He was going to be married to this beautiful woman walking beside him. Soon he would do what his body had wanted to do since the first time he saw her: scoop her up like the small thing she was and kiss her face a hundred times and curl his body around her, naked and full of bliss. As he walked beside her, smelling the warmth of her hair and neck, every particle inside him that was capable of feeling was lit up like a star.
So much of his life seemed foreign to him now. After she had agreed to marry him, that day on his boat, he’d gone below, and the interior of the yacht, which he’d lived in for years, seemed different—small and dank, full of artifacts from dreams that had died long ago. Maps and navigation manuals left over from his fantasy of sailing the world alone. Business cards from men at the camel market—a reminder that he had once wanted to buy camels and spend long months in the desert with the Bedouins. It surprised him how easily he had accepted the death of these dreams. And now he was eager to move into what was new. To sign the marriage document. To make it real. This urgency was also driven by the memory of what had happened with Fatimah, who had ripped him up by the roots and thrown him aside. He was terrified that this engagement would end the same way: suddenly and with helpless fury. Only this would be more brutal. He had so much more invested. The fear thrummed deep in his chest, occasionally racing like hummingbird wings, and he swallowed it hard, clawed it back. Get away from the bloom in my heart.
The thing was, all that was good was more dazzling than ever, but all that was bad came with a terrific shock. He had never known jealousy so charged. It could stop his heart. When Katya talked about her job, he tried to take comfort from the good she was doing for society, but at times he nearly died with the thought of every man she talked to, the men who saw her face, who spent entire days having access to her that he couldn’t. On his knees at the mosque, he’d lost whole du’as being distracted by disgust for his fellow men. He thought of them all: Men who leaped out of their cars to harass single women walking down the street. Men who sneaked into women’s shopping malls dressed like women so they could prey on young girls. Men who Bluetoothed naked photos of themselves to anyone in a sixty-foot radius; pompous pectorals appeared on his cell phone, the peacock feathers of the modern teenage boy. He was determined to control this fury. When he came back to his senses, he prayed for forgiveness, prayed that no matter what vulgar temptations got thrown in her path, Katya would love him with her own single-minded passion.
“I need a wall,” she said.
“Pardon me?”
“A big, blank wall.” She sighed, and he stole a glance at her face. It wore preoccupation, defiance. “I managed to get copies of all the photographs of the dead bodies. There are nineteen of them, remember? I need somewhere to hang them all in the positions in which they were found.”
He wanted to ask why the investigators hadn’t done that already. But of course they wouldn’t want pictures of women’s naked bodies displayed on their walls unless it was absolutely necessary. And perhaps it wasn’t.
“Majdi—you remember him? The head of forensics. You met him that one time. He’s already created a computer model of the site that’s true to geographical detail,” she said. “But it’s kind of flat and meaningless. I think it’s best to do this the old-fashioned way.”
He tried to understand. Who better to look at photographs of women’s bodies than a woman? “I have a wall for you,” he said.
She immediately shook her head. “Your boat is far too small.”
“I was thinking of my uncle’s house.”
“Oh. That’s very sweet, but we couldn’t. They’re graphic photos of dead women. You probably won’t want to look at them yourself.”
“It won’t bother me or my uncle,” he said. “We won’t look at the photos if that’s what you want.”
“No, no, it’s not that—”
“We have a wall.”
An hour later, they were standing in Samir’s basement.
Katya had never met Samir before. Although he was Nayir’s only family, she had not heard that much about him except that he had raised Nayir by himself, without a woman’s help. Perhaps for that reason, he’d seemed mysterious. Had he cooked? Changed diapers? Sung lullabies and read stories and held Nayir on his lap when he cried? She imagined a chubby, effeminate man who watched soaps every day sitting on a tatty sofa in the same house robe he’d worn for thirty years.
The real Samir was stocky but graceful. He wore a pair of shiny leather loafers, a suit with a vest, and a dark green ascot tucked into his collar. It was nearly nine o’clock when they arrived at his door, and he answered looking very much like a butler, his gray hair glimmering in the golden light of his foyer.
He smiled at Katya in a way that was understated but beaming somehow with an inner excitement. He welcomed the three of them and sent Nayir to prepare tea and dates while he escorted their guests to the empty wall.
Samir was a chemist like her father, but where Abu had spent his life working in factories and universities, Samir had remained independent. He worked out of his basement, doing freelance projects for archaeologists and the occasional historian, conducting his own research into anything that interested him, the details of which he assured her were boring. He kept his equipment in a basement laboratory. Katya and Ayman were standing there now. It was brightly lit and spacious, and the cool air was a relief. Ayman grinned.
“Will this be enough space for your photographs?” Samir motioned to the wall at the back of the house.
“More than enough,” she said. “However, perhaps I should do this myself. The images are graphic.”
“Yes, yes, I’ve seen crime scene photos before. I’ve even unearthed dead bodies myself, at archaeological digs. I know what to expect. Unless you’d prefer us to leave?”
“No, you’re welcome to stay. I just wanted to warn you.”
“Well, don’t worry. I won’t be offended, and I’d be glad to assist. The more eyes, the better.” Samir glanced at Ayman, who shrugged affably, trying to look adult. He was hoping that Katya wouldn’t force him to leave. He was only nineteen and inclined to get grilled by Katya’s father about her whereabouts.
She took the photos from her bag and began to hang them up. Samir oversaw the operation, guiding her from the map. They had just finished the last photo when Nayir entered with a tea tray. The look of quiet dismay on his face made her feel ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I probably should have warned you we were hanging them now.”
“It’s all right,” he replied, setting the tray on a workbench. At least he hadn’t said I’ll keep my gaze pure. How many times had she heard that ridiculous phrase? It meant that a man could look at something scandalous—a woman’s naked arm, her hair, her neck—and choose not to see it because his mind was pure.
Once the photos were up, Katya felt ridiculous. Now what?
She had already noticed from the map that the bodies had been buried in a circular formation, with twelve bodies on the outer edge and seven filling up the middle.
“Well, it’s a circle,” Ayman said.
“Technically, it’s a hexagon,” Samir replied. “In fact, a very carefully shaped hexagon.”
“Does it mean anything?” Ayman asked.
“I don’t know,” Samir said. “What do you think?”
Katya glanced at Nayir. He was staring at the photos with a look of quiet horror.
“It’s the shape of a honeycomb?” Ayman said.
“Hmm, yes.”
They fell quiet. Katya realized that she hadn’t really needed a wall as much as she needed a crime team who was familiar with the case.
“What are these crosses on the map?” Samir asked.
“Those mark the spots where they found the hands,” Katya said. “The victims’ hands were cut off.”
“Only three of them?” Samir asked.
“No, all of the victi
ms’ hands were cut off, but they only found three of them buried at the site.”
“And the other hands, where are they?”
“We have no idea.”
Samir took a marker from a jar on the desk and placed a small cross on each of the photos to show where they had found the hands.
“But how peculiar that only three should be buried!” Samir said, still looking at the map.
They fell into an even more maudlin silence. Nayir, who had poured everyone a cup of tea, was the only one who had actually picked up his cup. He leaned against the desk and sipped his tea.
“The bodies,” he said. Everyone turned. It was a surprise to hear him speak. “They’re oddly positioned.”
“It looks like the killer just dumped them there,” Katya said.
“So this killer takes a great deal of time plotting out a hexagonal burial pattern, and then he simply tosses the bodies into their graves?” Nayir asked. “They’re all buried in haphazard positions.”
“You’re right,” Samir said. “That is odd.” He turned to the wall and Nayir stood up, both seeming to come to something at the same moment. “Can it be?” Samir said.
Nayir set his cup on the desk, took the pen from Samir, and went to the wall. “There is a pattern. Do you see it?”
She was staring frantically at the photos. “No. What?”
He started at the upper right-hand corner. Beneath the body, he drew a simple shape.
It was the letter B. It was also the shape the body was positioned in, with the head and feet slightly turned upward. The point beneath the stroke was where the hand had been buried.
“Allah,” Katya whispered. “It can’t be.”
Nayir continued drawing. On the next photo to the left, he wrote S.
He wrote it without the left-hand tail because it was meant to connect to the following letter, M.
From a bird’s-eye view, the body had been buried with the torso bent to the right, arms curled to the chest to resemble an M. He wrote the entire photo collection out in letters, but they had already figured out the phrase. It was as familiar to them as breathing.
Bism’allah, ar-rahman, ar-rahim.
“In the name of Allah, most gracious, most merciful.” The beginning of every prayer.
Katya had to sit down. Samir, who looked rather pale himself, brought her a cup of tea and sat beside her. She had a fleeting moment of regret that this should be their first meeting. She took an unsteady sip.
“Monstrous,” Samir whispered.
Nayir set down the marker and came to his uncle’s side. Ayman was unable to move, his eyes fixed on the wall with a look of amazement.
“I didn’t realize that this is what you did at work,” he said.
“Drink your tea, young man,” Samir said. “This is nothing to marvel at. It is evil, and when you see it, you should turn away.”
Surprisingly, Ayman obeyed. He sat down next to Katya and drank his tea. “But just because you’ve worked out his mad genius, so what?” Ayman said. “It doesn’t mean anything. He said something we all say every day. I mean, it would have been nice if he’d left his address or something.”
This won no smiles.
“I’m sorry about this,” Katya said. “I shouldn’t have brought these here.”
“Don’t apologize, my dear,” Samir replied, patting her on the arm. “Nayir has solved a puzzle for you. It is also remarkable to see firsthand what sort of challenges you face in your work. Now we will have an even higher respect for what you do. And no one here”—he looked around—“lacks the stomach for it, least of all yourself.”
She gave him a half smile and refrained from pointing out that Ayman was right: it all meant nothing. They had simply pulled back the rock and looked down at the teeming insect colony of a psychopathic mind.
On the way back to Ayman’s car, Nayir said, “When I struggle with things, especially things I can’t understand, I find it’s best to search for the answer in a dream.” He gazed at her face, a phenomenon rare enough to make her feel flustered. “Istiqara,” he said. “Ask for an answer and Allah will oblige.”
She smiled. She had forgotten that there was a fourth type of dreaming—istiqara. “Maybe I’ll try that.”
“I’ll e-mail you the prayers.”
She thanked him and climbed into the car beside Ayman.
24
O Allah! I ask guidance from Your knowledge
And power from Your might
And I ask for Your great blessings.
You are capable, and I am not.
You know, and I do not.
You know the unseen.
O Allah! If You know that this information
Is good for me in my present and later needs
Then make it easy for me to get
And bless me in it.
And if You know that this information is harmful for me
Then keep it away from me
And ordain for me whatever is good for me
And make me satisfied with it.
This was her earnest petition just before bed. It led to an agonized darkness of heat and sweat and bedsheets twisted around her feet like chains. It led to hellish caverns of al-Balad where half-human creatures from the age before man were born of the blood of murdered women. They sprang, fully formed, from a touch of fire into the stunted forms of efreet, their skin blackened, crisp and peeling from the flames, their eyes yellow and malevolent and all-seeing. They chased her into alleys and set her clothes on fire. They were born of the blood of women, and they craved her. They surrounded her in the alley on Falasteen where Amina’s hand had been found, and they dragged her screaming down the sidewalk, their swords chopping off first her feet, then her hands, her body bouncing helplessly over the corpses of countless other women. All the women of Jeddah were lying there dead. Daher was there too, and Ibrahim. They were talking. She screamed, but they couldn’t hear.
And then the dream changed. She was in a world of hills and rain, gray skies and green fields. She was being dragged across the ground, over thorny bushes. Then the efreet were shoving her into the earth, a cold, black, fertile, insect-laden earth from an ancient imagining. It had crossed continents to reach them, this fairy tale of black earth. They shoved her in, filling her mouth with it, forcing fistfuls of dirt down her throat, and she woke with a horrified gasp and rolled out of bed and cried.
In the tale of the porter and the princess,” Katya said, “the princess kills the efreet, am I right?”
“Yeees.” Her father was giving her a dour look. “Why do you ask?”
“I had a dream last night that a bunch of efreet shoved me underground. It makes me think of that story.”
“I don’t remember what happens,” he said, “except that the efreet attacked the princess because the porter sneaked into the underground lair to rescue her, and the two lovers wound up kissing. The efreet are jealous creatures.”
“She kills them all, in the story,” Katya said. “She burns them to cinders.”
But it made her feel no better about the dream.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look very pale.”
She went to work feeling persecuted, unable to shake off the last remnants of the night. She had prayed to Allah, and the devil had answered instead.
Modern-day devils are not hard to spot. They pose as the most righteous. They live in fear of being found for what they really are.
This was Katya’s first, ungenerous thought when she passed Abu-Musa in the hallway on the way to Ibrahim’s office. He scowled at the floor as she went by. He might have scowled at her face, but that would have been improper.
One of the reasons she hated him was that he looked almost exactly like a salesclerk at Ikea to whom she had once given her address and phone number for the delivery of a desk and a set of shelves. He had then called her every day for a month, first leaving messages asking politely if she would meet him for dinner, then, when he realized she wouldn’t call him back,
leaving hateful messages, accusations that she was a whore, that only a whore would give a strange man her number, and that he was certain she ought to be properly treated with a cock shoved violently between her wet thighs. She had had to get a new telephone number, and for months she had been afraid to go in or out of her apartment on her own.
She stopped at Ibrahim’s office door. He was standing behind his desk, frowning with aggravation at the stacks of papers piled there.
“Yes, Miss Hijazi,” he said when he saw her.
She stepped inside and laid a folder on his desk. “I’m sorry to add to your piles of paperwork,” she said, “but this is very important. I discovered it last night.”
“What is it?”
Abu-Musa appeared in the doorway behind her. He was still scowling. “Is it proper for you to be here, Miss Hijazi?”
She was taken aback. In all the months she’d worked here, she’d never actually been told that she was acting out of place. It was usually communicated via a gesture or glance, a whispered warning from her boss Zainab.
“Miss Hijazi has just delivered a very important case file,” Ibrahim said. “Can I help you?”
“Technically, Miss Hijazi should not even be in the building,” Abu-Musa replied.
She thanked Ibrahim and left the room.
She didn’t work that morning. She sat in front of her computer, one hand on her mouse, and stared at the screen. If someone passed behind her, she clicked the mouse to make it seem like she was busy, but her mind was the only thing in motion.
At eleven o’clock she left the building for an early lunch break. She had brought a bagged lunch, but she wasn’t hungry; she just wanted to be outside.
She headed away from the water, deeper into the city, and walked as if she had a purpose, even if it was only to be walking. She passed mothers shepherding children; young men leaning from car windows laughing, their music vibrating in her rib cage. Old men stood in front of their shops smoking cigarettes and talking. In front of a boofiya, men were perched on plastic chairs watching a television that was plugged into a generator, their only shade a feeble tree. Two young girls were sitting on a wooden fence, eating fruit and whispering over a shared cell phone. When a young man approached them, one girl threw a grape at him and hissed, and he turned away, flushing.
