by Lavie Tidhar
Joe sat back on the bed, his back against the wall. He regarded the man from the CPD through half-closed eyes. The words seemed to come from a long way down, somewhere deep inside him. ‘Maybe we had nowhere else to go,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ the man from the CPD said. ‘I really am.’
‘So am I,’ Joe said. It felt as if he spoke into a vast and empty chasm, his words falling like pieces of torn paper down into nothing.
The man from the CPD nodded his head, once. Then he walked out of the cell and closed the door behind him. Joe heard locks slide into place.
Then there was only a solitary silence.
cell
——
Time did not exist here. Twice a day a grille would open in the door and a tray would be pushed through. The tray was made of metal, with three cavities forming the shape of a cross. There was food on the tray and water in the basin. The prisoner drank the water and washed himself in it, splashing it onto his armpits, over his face, like a man with a long stop-over at an airport. The food had a chemical aftertaste. When he used the toilet the cell stank. After a while the prisoner stopped noticing the smell.
His thoughts in that time of solitary confinement were not quite thoughts. They were fragments, like a jigsaw puzzle made of torn-up photos all mixed-up together. They never seemed to fit. There were memories in there but he could no longer tell which had been real, which hadn’t. There was, for instance, a man in a beaver hat, creeping around with a lantern held high in his hand. Bits of dialogue from a silent film’s title card, shining-white floating over black screen: You mean a ghost?
Not a ghost. Worse…
There was a girl with slightly-slanted eyes and brown hair and pinned-back, pointed ears, but she had no name. There was an airport, fog, a plane waiting to take off. They were not quite dreams, because he never dreamed any more. They were just the fragments of snapshots assembled from somewhere, somewhen else. The plane was going to a land over the rainbow. The girl was getting on the plane. There was an argument. He had on the wide-brimmed hat he’d bought in Paris and lost somewhere on the way.
You must get on that plane, he kept saying. You must get on the plane. She called his name, but it wasn’t his name. Maybe not today, he kept saying. Maybe not today.
Sometimes the door would open and they would come in. At first he fought them but they always overpowered him, easily, and then there would be the quick cold pain in his neck where the carotid artery was and then the numbness. Most of the time he didn’t know what they did. Sometimes they stripped him, gloved hands prodded and poked and measured. Sometimes they stripped him and took photos. Sometimes he was back in the chair and there were questions. The man with the grey hair was back, standing with his back to the wall, his face in silhouette. He was asking questions about what the people in the Hotel Kandahar called the Osamaverse. It was like an endless quiz about Mike Longshott’s novels. The prisoner said, ‘I don’t know,’ until it became a mantra, releasing him from imprisonment, so that while his body was still there his mind was far away, hovering over the abyss where the next world was, or the next, or the next. ‘Why don’t you arrest him?’ he said once.
‘Arrest who?’ the man with the grey hair said.
‘Longshott.’
The man said something about containable risks, and managing information distribution. The prisoner took it to mean they didn’t know where Longshott was. ‘We could shut down his publisher,’ the man from the CPD pointed out. Sometimes it was as if he were inside the prisoner’s head. The prisoner said, ‘Why don’t you?’
‘He’s more useful this way,’ the man from the CPD said.
Sometimes they stuck needles inside him, drew blood. Sometimes they attached electrodes to his temples, to his chest, took his pulse, measured his heart beat, his brain waves, the phrenological proportions of his skull.
‘Tell me the truth, Doc,’ the prisoner once said. ‘Give it to me straight. Am I going to live?’
The man with the grey hair shook his head with slow, precise movements. ‘You’re already dead,’ he said tiredly. ‘You just don’t know it yet.’
But the prisoner did. The prisoner drifted in the blackness that wasn’t sleep, and as he did he dreamed of doors in films.
doors in films
——
Always, they were asking him questions. The questions made no sense to the prisoner. The questions were: ‘How do cell phones work? What is an iPod? What is in Area 51?’ The prisoner didn’t know the answers to these questions. They asked him: ‘How do you make a computer the size of a briefcase? What is the meaning of flash mobs and how do you control them? What is DRM? What is Asian fusion? Is it nuclear technology?’
There was some confusion as to that last point, but the prisoner couldn’t enlighten them.
‘What is Star Wars?’ They had been very worried about that one.
He understood from them that he was not the first refugee they had interviewed this way. But he had no answers.
Not even — particularly for — himself.
Who was he? Where had he come from? Increasingly, the prisoner felt this world fading away around the corners while he floated in the great peaceful darkness. More and more it seemed to him there were other voices there, the silence broken by half-whispers and mutterings, mumbling, singing, voices etching words into the darkness as if they could leave them there forever.
But they always pulled him back: measuring his sweat secretion, his blood properties, his pupils, his hair, his fingernails, his body temperature inside and out, and they kept asking him questions.
‘What is a modem? Who is James Bond? What are smart cars? What is Al-Jazeera?’
They had been very worried about that last one, too.
Sometimes they were gone, just like that, fleeting from the edges of his cell like ghosts, fading away like mist, and he was alone. Twice a day a grille would open in the door and a tray would be pushed through. There was food on the tray and water in the basin. The prisoner drank the water, but he no longer washed. The water tasted like cough medicine. He would ask himself questions. Where do you come from? Where are you going? What is your name? When he pictured the girl he felt better, then worse. She had moved her hand over his, and there was something terribly intimate and familiar about the gesture.
‘I will find you,’ she had said. ‘I will always find you.’
But here there was no motion of light in water. The girl was as barred from the prisoner’s cell as the future is inexorably barred from the past. There was only the one door, and it led nowhere. He would study the stains on the walls, searching for patterns in the way they stretched and shrivelled like pulsating, living things. He could see faces in them, clouds, typewriters, mountains. He thought about doors in film.
They were like the fabriques in Parc Monceau. Films were constructed landscapes, a fakery made up of the torn pieces of differing locations. A door opened on the outside of a building, in a movie, and it led — more often than not — not into the inside of the building, but somewhere else. There were transitions in film, smoothed over, made seamless, but they were transitions nevertheless, a shortcut through both space and time. Opening a door in film was like prying open a transdimensional gate: it could lead anywhere, everywhere. It was a realisation the prisoner shied from.
More and more the voices crystallized, like a signal strengthening on a wireless radio set. They whispered, shouted, cried, laughed. They jabbered and muttered and mumbled and yelled, their constant babble invading the darkness. He couldn’t shut them out.
And more questions. He couldn’t shut those out either. ‘Describe a stealth bomber. Describe smart bombs. How does a wireless network operate? What do Scud missiles look like? What is Nintendo? What is a Shenzhou-5?’
‘Where is Mike Longshott?’ the prisoner said. More and more that became his focus, the lode-star to which he could pin the shreds of himself.
‘There is no Mike Longshott.’
Bu
t he knew they were lying.
Finding Mike Longshott gave him his purpose back. He began to rebuild the detective out of the floating fragments loose in the darkness. He began to map a landscape, a vista of fabriques.
‘What is your name?’ they kept asking him in interrogation. ‘What was your name?’
‘Joe,’ the prisoner whispered. ‘Joe.’
‘There is no Joe.’
But he knew they were lying.
Then came a time when no one came, and he was left alone in the cell. Though the darkness abated a little, the voices were still there. They sounded louder in the confines of the cell. Mike Longshott, the prisoner thought. And the thought brought with it clarity. He was a detective, and this was his case. He was a detective. In the top drawer of the desk in his office there was an illegal knockoff Smith & Wesson .38, and a bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label: half-empty or half-full, depending.
The voices whispered advice. They were not ready to move on. He thought he recognised familiar voices in the babble but couldn’t be sure. He thought about doors in films. If you opened a door in a fabricated landscape, it could lead you anywhere you wanted to go. But he was afraid of opening the door.
yellow-sun brightness
——
In his cell, the prisoner prepared. He was accompanied now by the voices of the dead, whispering to him, urging him on. He wished he could shut them within the pages of a book. In the stains on the walls he now saw faces, nothing but faces staring back at him. ‘Longshott,’ he said out loud, tasting the name. The shadows murmured assent. The prisoner knew what he was, but didn’t know who. He stared at the door, and the door stared back. He put his hand against its metal surface and it was warm. There was a long jagged scratch in the grey paint at the prisoner’s waist level. The door had no handle. ‘Osama,’ he said, tasting this word, too, like a strange wine, with hints of acidity and some rust. ‘Osama Bin Laden.’
The shadows hissed, like puppets in a theatre. I’m ready, the prisoner thought. He thought of the girl. He pictured mountains. He undressed slowly: at some point his clothes had gone, and he was given a prisoner’s uniform, blood-orange, beltless, and he shelled it off with relief and stood there naked, and with both his hands flat against the surface of the door, he pushed.
The voices grew in pitch and agitation. Yellow light sipped under the door, in the process whitening. He thought he could feel a wind, cold and clean: a mountain wind, flowing and then surging through the edges of the door. He pushed, and the white light turned brighter, a yellow-sun brightness, and its warmth was on his naked skin. He pushed and the door opened, or perhaps disappeared, and the voices rose into an unbearable crescendo. For a long moment the prisoner just stood there, looking out. He thought about freedom. It was what you had when you had nothing left to lose. He stared at the rectangle of bright light and for a moment it was quiet. The voices had fled ahead of him, waited for him on the other side.
The prisoner put his hands against the rectangle of light, testing it. There was no resistance. He could sense the waiting voices. The prisoner shivered, once, and was still.
Joe stepped through the door.
IN TRANSIT
ghost stories
——
There was a bluejay outside my window that morning. Its crest was fully raised, suggesting it was excited, or it was being aggressive. They’re aggressive birds, the bluejays. They’re tough, adaptable, and they’ve been colonizing new habitats for decades. They like bright shiny objects, like coins, and have a reputation, not entirely deserved, for raiding other birds’ nests, and stealing eggs and hatchlings, even the nests themselves. They are very pretty birds, the bluejays. I think this one was a male. I peered at it through the glass and it looked back at me, and the sun streamed in through the window and it looked like it was going to be a beautiful day. I was up early because I had to go to the airport. The colour of a bluejay comes not from pigmentation but from the special structure of its feathers. If you crush the feather, the blue will slowly fade as the structure of the feather is destroyed. I left bed without waking my wife and went downstairs to the kitchen. I put on the coffee and while I waited I looked through my vinyl records and finally put on Duke Ellington’s Mood Indigo, Duke on piano, Joe Nanton on trombone, Whetsol on the trumpet, Bigard on clarinet, Fred Guy on banjo, Braud on bass and Sonny Greer on drums. I’d bought that album when I was a kid, when they still had vinyl in every shop, and I knew every groove and every scratch on that old record. I poured myself some coffee and listened to Duke Ellington and saw that the bluejay had followed me down to the kitchen and was chattering at me through the window. When I had finished the coffee I went back upstairs, the notes of the piano following me as I climbed, and I got dressed and brushed my teeth and picked up my suitcase, which was already packed. My wife turned over on her back and opened her eyes and gave me a sleepy smile and I bent down and kissed her, and she turned around and went back to sleep. I wish, now, I’d told her I loved her. I went downstairs and put away the record, slipping it into its sleeve carefully and placing it with the others. Before I left I trailed my hand over the records, absent-mindedly. When I went outside I could no longer see the bluejay. I drove to the airport with my window half-open. I could smell pancakes from a diner further down the street. When I got to the airport I left the car in the car-park and went into the terminal building. I had to go to Los Angeles for a meeting, and as I sat on the plane waiting for it to leave I made notes on a notepad, things I was going to say, but mostly just doodling.
* * *
The reason I was on the bus that day is, there was a lot of confusion around King’s Cross, they said there was a power failure, to be honest no one knew what was going on. We were evacuated out from the tube to Euston Bus Station and it was like a sea of nervous, irritable people, too many bodies all together in a crowd, trying to get to work, pushing, and the buses crawling into station like red-shelled snails sick with a summer cold. I was already late and I had a presentation to give that day and so I pushed my way to the bus and somehow managed to get a seat — I was sitting on the upper deck, by the window, looking out on the station. I noticed one boy detach himself from the crowd, moving away into a relatively quiet area, where he stood and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. He had wavy brown hair and wore earphones and as he smoked he nodded his head in time with the music — I remember wondering what album he was listening too, and also trying to see his eyes. For just a moment, as the bus was pulling out of the station, he looked up, and I think he saw me, we were looking at each other, and he smiled. He had a nice smile. For just a moment I had this crazy notion of getting off the bus, pushing out and through all the waiting people, go up to this guy, say something, I don’t know what. Maybe just smile, and bum a cigarette. Maybe ask him what the time was, or if he wanted to go get a coffee. Something. But I never do things like that, and anyway the bus was pulling out of the station, and the guy was looking elsewhere and I sat back and when I looked through the window again he was gone.
* * *
I liked to come to Dahab in April, when Europe was still cold and only beginning to show signs of spring, but the Sinai was hot and dry and beautiful. I liked to sit on the cushions in the beach-front restaurants and smoke a sheesha-pipe and look out on the Red Sea. I loved to sit there at dusk, when there’s a kind of hush over everything, and watch the sunset with my shades on. I came to Dahab every year, even after the bombings in Ras-el-Shitan, even after the bombings in Sharm the year after. You can’t stop living your life. And it’s been quieter there, but you still got the tourists, they came from all over. I’ve been coming to the Sinai for years. There is no heat like it, not anywhere. The sun is so strong there, and the light suffuses everything with the quality of old, fine clay, making objects seem opaque and fragile. And the hash is good. And I was sitting in the restaurant and thinking about what to order, thinking about a dip of smoky-flavoured roasted aubergines, anticipating the taste of the food on my tongue ev
en before I voiced it, when it happened.
* * *
The blast came like a thunderstorm in a bay, when the sound rolls and continues to roll, echoing from one shore to the other. I was on a bus from Ugi. It stopped outside the American embassy. I saw a truck stop outside the embassy. I saw a man step out. I saw him swing his arm and heard a popping sound. The last thing I remember seeing is the window crumbling. It moved towards me. It was like being in the sea, the way the current used to wash over me when I was a girl. I must have been thrown back. I put my hand to my mouth and realised I had no teeth. I touched my eyes, but there was nothing there. I didn’t feel pain, but I remember worrying about my hair. I tried to touch my hair and couldn’t feel it. I was going to get it done that afternoon in a saloon on Ngara Road.
* * *
Asses and elbows. It was asses and elbows in there. The call came in and we got on the rig, and as we’re driving down the kid in the back — the proby — he said it was an attack. I didn’t know what it was, at that time. I don’t think anyone really knew. When we got to the building and looked up it was, like, uh — arms and legs, waving — they were jumpers. There was a lot of smoke, a lot of damage in the lobby. The — there were a lot of jumpers. We went into the building, started climbing up the stairs. Single file. After a dozen floors we started taking breaks, every four. Four floors. We made it to the — the thirty-third? Thirty-fourth floor? — people were coming down the stairs, helping each other down, injuries everywhere — I was with my hands on my knees, taking in air, we were talking about hooking up with another company to get up there, all the while there’s a throbbing passing through the building, like the sound of a train as it approaches the platform, growing in intensity. Then someone came on the radio, said, ‘Drop everything and get out.’ He said it a couple of times. We were moving out, when there was a — I don’t know how to describe that sound — the ceiling was collapsing, and I remember looking up. That’s what I remember. Looking up, and suddenly not seeing anything.
