by Lavie Tidhar
Joe let his hands fall to his sides. He turned, half a circle, fingers outstretched. He tried to find a sense of the inhabitant of that room, that house. Was anyone still living there? In one corner of the room, he noticed, a long-necked flower vase stood on a platform, but there were no flowers in it. He turned again, completing a circle, and something caught his eye. On the wall beside the bookcase was what appeared to be a framed photograph. He approached it slowly. On the top, just below the frame, it said TIME and, at the bottom end: MAN OF THE YEAR. He approached it, cautious for reasons he couldn’t articulate. A face slowly resolved itself inside the frame and he took a deep shuddery breath and looked…
The face that stared back at him, framed within, was his own.
afternoon dreams
——
After a moment he laughed, though without much humour. It was not a photograph at all. It was a mirror, the text painted on to the reflecting surface. What did he expect to see there? Longshott, he thought. Or a man with a long beard and clear, penetrating eyes, the hero of pulp thrillers and suicide killers. Instead all he got was himself. He stared at his own face staring back at him. Did he even know that face? There was a name that went with it, an occupation, but were they themselves real, or were they, too, mere fabriques, as fake as a passport could be faked? He shook his head, and the face in the mirror mimicked the movement.
He turned away. Went to the desk. Again, he felt the urge to touch, to feel. He picked up each object in turn, examined it, replaced it on the desk. Pens, blue and black and red. A child’s pencil sharpener. He lifted it to his nose and smelled it, but there was no sign of recent wood shavings, no sign of recent use. Stones, pebbles made smooth by water. Seashells that must have come from somewhere else, from a far and distant sea. Their colours were the hues of sunset. He smoothed a feather with his finger. He weighed coins in his hand. Faces etched into the metal regarded him back with haughty expressions, kings and queens and emperors and presidents. He pulled open the drawers, one by one. They were mostly empty. In the second of three drawers he found a single item. A thin, unadorned gold ring, a woman’s size. It felt heavy in his hand and he put it back, carefully, and closed the drawer. As he did so, a sheet of paper fluttered down to the ground. He picked it up. A few lines, scribbled — hastily, it seemed — in blue ink that had somewhat smudged on the page. The handwriting was untidy. It took him a while to untangle it. It said:
we had ankle-length boots
that let us wade in shallow pools
like resolute explorers
impervious to rainwater, mud or frogspawn
or those tired warnings, seldom heeded,
not to go into the puddles on purpose.
that winter I could read the map
the water charted
and knew the purpose in a snail’s
slow, slimy track as it slid along a window pane.
then the sun came and brought with it
the end of winter
and meaning dried away
and was gone with the last of the rains.
The poem vaguely disturbed him. He didn’t know why. He put the sheet back on the desk, face down. Next, he looked through the books on the desk. To the left of the typewriter were the four Vigilante books. He picked up the uppermost one, the earliest in the series, Assignment: Africa. The binding was worn, the spine cracked in places. He leafed through it and saw that it was annotated, in a mix of pencil and red ink, words crossed out and others written in, punctuation examined and found lacking, typos circled in patient, careful loops and rings.
He put it down, and as he did he upset some invisible balance, some delicate equilibrium that had been suddenly disturbed. There was a cascade of papers, pebbles, pens, seashells and coins and the sudden unexpected noise made Joe’s palms wet with sweat, made his heart beat faster. He stepped back, tried to calm his breathing. Debris settled on the floor. Silence returned. The air itself was still, the tiny breeze he’d felt before had already departed. The air was thick with afternoon heat, afternoon dreams.
Joe examined the fallout. On the desk a seismic shift had taken place, a clash of tectonic plates creating a new pattern across the surface. Underneath what had been a miniature mountain of books a stack of pages was revealed.
They were stacked neatly one on top of the other. White pages, edges aligned, the typewritten lines running left to right in single-space. On the first page, centred, surrounded by blank space, a title: The Last Stand. Below it, a familiar sub-title: An Osama Bin Laden: Vigilante Novel.
Below, still: By Mike Longshott.
Adjacent to the manuscript was a book open face-down on the desk. The title was familiar, but it took Joe a moment to realise it was the same title he had picked up, briefly, at the market in town.
A Tourist Guide to the Tora Bora Caves. He picked it up, leafed through it. Pictures of mountains, pine trees, cave openings in the bedrock. The place looked quiet and peaceful, the pictures exuding a faint air of disuse.
He moved his gaze to the typewriter. A new sheet of paper was inserted into the machine. It was partially typed. Joe reached for it, pulled it out, gently, his fingers leaving damp prints on the paper.
black dust
… in the White Mountains. In Pashto its name meant {The Black Cellar} Black Dust. An extensive network of natural caves, they had been greatly extended in the 1980s with the assistance of the {American Central Intelligence Agency} {the Agency} the CIA. Twenty years later they were to become the {subterranean} grounds for the Battle of Tora Bora between Osama Bin Laden’s men and coalition troops from the United States and the United Kingdom.
Kabul had fallen. As the tanks rolled into the city Osama Bin Laden’s fighters had already left. They went into the mountains, amassing at last in the caves of the {Safed Koh}, the White Mountains, fifty kilometres away from the Khyber Pass.
It should have been the last stand of Osama Bin Laden. In the event, it was nothing more than one more battle in an {extensive} ongoing, prolonged war.
US Air Force B-52H Stratofortress strategic bombers were deployed, fresh from the battle of Kabul. They dropped a steady barrage of {bombs} ordnance over the mountains, chief amongst them the 500-pound Mark 82 bombs and the 15,000-pound BLU-82 bombs, known as Daisy Cutters. US Special Forces were inserted into the battle zone by helicopters, and British SAS commandos attempted to penetrate the caves, leading to intense close-combat fire-fights. Outside, {bomb} craters were filled with rubble, and uprooted trees lay on their side.
As the fighting ended, and the caves had been swept clean, no trace could be found of Osama Bin Laden, nor of the bulk of his fighters. The Emir had disappeared into the snowy mountain paths, to regroup and continue the fi—
Longshott
——
Joe jumped. The sound was unexpected, loud in the silence. He had been staring at the page for some time. The rest of it was blank. It had been left off in mid-sentence. Joe looked around wildly but could see no source for the sound, which was, unarguably, a cough. He put the page down on the desk, his heart beating sickeningly fast. He heard a sort of rustling sound, coming from the direction of what he had assumed was the kitchen, the cough again, and light footsteps. Outside a bird, perhaps similarly disturbed, was chattering manically in a rapid percussion. Joe took a step back from the desk.
The shadow came first. It fell down from the open doorway onto the dusty floor, a thin emaciated blade of shade. Then it stretched, shrank, and a man came through into the room with a gun in his hand.
The man first: tall, thin, with shoulders that stooped a little, as if used to carrying a burden that could not, momentarily, be seen. The clothes hung from his frame as if he had been better fed once, and had since lost his appetite for nourishment. His face, too, was long and thin. He was unshaven. His hair was brown and, like the rest of the man, thinning.
The gun was a single-action revolver: an antique. In his other hand the man held a polishing rag. The butt of the gun was
worn a smooth silver. When he saw Joe, the man stopped still. His eyes were brown and large in his face.
Joe, too, was still. His eyes were on the gun. The man said, ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Are you—?’ Joe said, and somehow all the questions he wanted to ask were crowding and thronging each other in his head and what came out was, ‘Are you going to shoot me?’
‘What? The man looked down at the gun in his hand as if noticing it for the first time. He put it away on the bookcase. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t even know you.’
‘I’m Joe.’
The man stared at him. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Joe.’
Outside the lone bird was still chattering away. Inside the heat felt oppressive. ‘Well, Joe,’ the man said, moving closer — ‘What do you want?’
‘I—’ as the man’s proximity increased Joe noticed a familiar, cloyingly sweet smell. It seemed to cling to the man, or perhaps to his clothes, like to a suit that had been entombed in mothballs for too long. He said, ‘You’re Mike Longshott.’
The man stopped beside the desk. His hand rested on its surface. ‘Yes…’ he said. There was a wondering note in his voice. ‘How—?’ Joe said, ‘How do you know?’ he gestured wildly in the air, taking in, in one encompassing sweep, the bookshelves, the Vigilante paperbacks, the uncompleted manuscript on the desk.
Longshott slowly nodded. Joe noticed he had a prominent Adam’s apple; it bobbed up and down as he swallowed. ‘Please,’ Longshott said. ‘Sit down.’ He gestured, in his turn, at the two worn armchairs. ‘You are a refugee?’
The question floated between them, lighter than air, unanswered. Then Longshott nodded again, equally slowly, and said, ‘Let me make some coffee.’
the luxury of waiting
——
They sat facing each other on the armchairs. The coffee was hot and sweet and burned Joe’s tongue. It had been flavoured with cinnamon. ‘My name,’ Longshott said, ‘isn’t really Mike Longshott. As you no doubt figured.’ He shrugged. ‘My name is really of very little significance,’ he said. ‘I picked Longshott because it had a nice ring to it. It sounded like the sort of name you’d find on a paperback.’
Joe nodded, decided the coffee was too sweet for his taste, and took a sip of cool water from the glass that lay resting on the table. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he said.
‘Not at all,’ Longshott said. ‘My own—’ he hesitated, ‘pipe is in the other room.’
Joe nodded at that too, as if he had been waiting for just such a confirmation. He extracted and lit a cigarette. The smoke curled lazily in the air. Joe didn’t speak. He had, he’d decided, the luxury of waiting.
Longshott was folded into the armchair opposite Joe. He looked lost inside that space, limbs jutting awkwardly like a doll’s when its strings had been loosened. He said, ‘There was a woman.’
Joe listened to the silence.
waxing moon
——
The was — there had been — a woman. He was working as a journalist, Mike — ‘My name really is Mike, you know—’ told him. He had developed a habit, gradually — ‘I was doing a series of articles on the opium trade, you see—’ and had taken to spend some of his leisure time in the smoking rooms where gentlemen — ‘Both foreign and local—’ of such habits congregated.
‘I first saw her on the first night of the full moon,’ Mike Longshott said. ‘You know, the moon becomes so much more important in places like this. On moonless nights it is so dark, but the stars are beautiful. Beautiful and cold… You can see so many stars out in the desert. But then the moon begins to rise, a little bigger every night — do you know how much light it gives out, how much you can see in the light of the moon?’
Joe nodded. He did know. There was a kind of desperation on moonless nights, when the stars, those alien beings an unimaginable distance away from the Earth, looked down on the world, in a kind of cold strange beauty that gave out no light. The moon was different, and when it came the darkness was lifted, the light of the sun reflecting off of the moon’s surface illuminating the dark world, giving it a soft silvery shape. The moon rose early when it waxed, like a pregnant woman, her belly growing until at last it was full. The fullness lasted for two days. Then the moon would wane, rising late like a surly teenager, growing smaller again until it disappeared and the darkness returned, and with her the stars.
‘Tell me about her,’ he said.
Mike Longshott nodded. ‘I saw her as I came out of the — the place,’ he said. ‘She was standing on the street, not doing anything. She was hugging herself, rocking on the soles of her feet. She looked very lost, and vulnerable. I saw her quite clearly in the light of the moon. When I came her way she turned. Her eyes were warm, I remember that. I remember thinking, they were not like stars. They were like sunlight reflected off the moon. She said, ‘Do you know where they are?’
‘I said, ‘Who?’
‘‘I can’t find them,’ she said. I didn’t know if she was speaking to me, or to herself. ‘They were there but now they’re not. Or maybe they are there, but I am not.’ She shivered, though it was a warm night, and she hugged herself closer. ‘Do you know where they are?’ she said.
‘I said, as gently as I could, ‘No.’
‘She turned fully to me then. Her arms dropped to her sides. She looked at me, at my face, for a long moment, as if searching for some familiar traces in them, for lines or curves I did not possess.
‘Though maybe I did. For, after that long moment had passed, she took a deep breath, and some of the anxiety seemed to go out of her, and she said, ‘Will you help me?’’
He took a sip of water then, and sat in silence for a while, staring into the air. It was then that Joe realised that the voices who had accompanied him, for a while, from his cell and up the hill, were silent now, and had been for a while. Absent or silent, he didn’t know, but he didn’t think they had gone. Like himself, they were waiting, listening to a story being told. He said, ‘Was she—?’ and Longshott said, ‘Yes. She was.’
waning
——
‘You might not credit it,’ Longshott said, ‘but I never learned her story. Oh, I had glimpses of it, from time to time. She spoke in her sleep, sometimes, crying out names — one name in particular. It wasn’t Mike.’ He shook his head. ‘I had the impression she had once had a son,’ he said. He was silent then, staring at his hands, lying loosely in his lap. He looked up and his eyes met Joe’s and the lines around his eyes were pronounced. ‘She… she waxed and waned with the moon,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it is the same for others. To me, it seemed like enchantment for a time — still does, when it comes to that. I only saw her when the moon was in the skies. I know she craved the daylight. She wanted to see the sun. It hurt her not to be able to. I once asked her where she went, when she wasn’t… wasn’t there. She didn’t know, or was unwilling to tell me. The times of no moon were the worse, for me. She would be gone, an absence, an emptiness no stars could dispel, and every time I worried she will not appear again. My… my habit increased. I smoked more pipes but they didn’t bring me relief. Instead, I began to imagine the world she must have come from. Details of it would come, unbidden, into my mind when I was in stupor. They came to me haltingly, at first. Dates, numbers. Headlines.’ He laughed. There was no humour in it. He said, ‘Do you know what a journalist is? Someone who hasn’t written a novel yet. I couldn’t write it in a newspaper. For a time, I didn’t need to write at all. Then…’
She had begun to appear less frequently. She was fading, it had seemed to him. Each night she was less substantial, less there. Only at the full moon did she still seem solid, present — ‘She was a present,’ he said. ‘My present. I didn’t think in terms of past or future. There was only the moment, when she was there, in my arms, when I could hold her and comfort her and stroke her hair in the light of the moon…’
It had seemed to him more opium would help, but it didn’t. Instead, that other, imaginar
y world encroached more and more on his own, until he could no longer tell them apart. When walking the streets sometimes he thought he saw others who were like her, shades on the street corners, refugees from another place and time, but he never tried to talk to them. She was all he had.
‘And then she was gone. She was gone with the full moon as it set on the horizon. Her hair was spun silver. I held her hand in mine and it was translucent, I could see the blood vessels inside, bones like pale crystals. ‘I think I see them,’ she said. That was the last thing she said to me. The next night she didn’t appear, or the next, or the one after that.’ He looked up at Joe, but his eyes weren’t seeing. ‘I was alone.’
He waited the dark time for the new moon to be reborn. Yet when it was, she was absent from the night, and he knew she was not coming back. ‘That night I wrote the first chapter. I hardly sleep any more. When I close my eyes I see him, but always in the distance, like a cowled figure with clear cold eyes that are indifferent to me.’
Joe said — whispered — ‘Osama.’ The name shivered in the still air, seemed momentarily to assume a shape, a figure, then was gone.
‘Yes,’ Mike Longshott said. He shivered too, despite the heat. ‘My hero.’ He gave a laugh that was more of a cough. His hands shook. ‘Could you—?’ he said. Joe understood him. Far away he seemed to hear faint voices, whispering. He rose from the armchair and walked over to Mike Longshott, helping him to stand up. ‘It’s in the other room,’ the writer said. There was sweat on his face. Gently, Joe took his arm. They walked together slowly, the writer half-leaning on Joe’s shoulder, and when they arrived in the other room Joe helped Longshott lie down on the cot the man had prepared for himself long ago, and watched him settle, and something seemed to break inside him, like weak glass. ‘Could you—?’ Mike Longshott said and Joe, biting his lips to stop the mist that seemed to have descended on his eyes, nodded wordlessly and helped him prepare the pipe, rolling the ball of resin in his fingers though the smell made him dizzy. He placed the mouthpiece of the pipe in the writer’s mouth and lit the flame to heat the resin, watching as Longshott’s features slowly relaxed and slackened as he inhaled the fumes travelling down the pipe.
