Escape from Baghdad!

by Saad Hossain

  “The chromosomes uncoil, and enzymes bind to each strand, replicating it.”

  “I know about biology too,” Hoffman chimed in. “And the reproductive cycle for humans. I know all the body parts.”

  “The high-school biology version, yes,” Dr. J said with a saucy wink. “Actually, when a chromosome is copied, it is not possible for the replicating mechanism to get all the way to the end: which means the bit at the end of each chromosome doesn’t get copied. Now that would mean that each time the chromosome gets copied, a little bit gets left out, a little bit of vital biological programming, possibly. After a certain number of copies, one would imagine there is nothing meaningful left.”

  “There is obviously something that stops this loss of genetic material.”

  “The telomeres. The telomere is a RNA-protein complex ‘cap’ or ‘knot’ at the ends of each chromosome placed there precisely to prevent vital genetic loss. Each time the chromosome replicates, a segment of telomere gets shortened. These telomere segments are synthesized by an enzyme, the telomerase reverse transcriptase. But due to various factors, including a shortage of these enzymes, the telomere chain gets shorter each time. After a large number of replications, the telomere gets all used up, and the cell stops being able to replicate properly. Hence, the telomere has been theoretically linked to a time bomb heralding old age and death.”

  “Cellular death programmed into us.”

  “Right,” Dr. J said. “It’s actually quite unfair. It’s as if someone designed a perfect, self-healing, self-correcting organism, and then went and programmed death into it.”

  “God?”

  “Don’t believe in him,” Dr. J said. “Although if he did it, it’s a very poor sort of joke.”

  “So if telomeres didn’t shorten, our cells would continue to repair themselves, and we would not face old age deterioration?”

  “Theoretically, that’s one way of looking at it,” Dr. J said. “The flip side is cancer, of course. The kinds of cells that achieve immortality by circumventing the telomere death are normally cancer cells. So in an evolutionary sense, programmed cell death might have developed to prevent runaway cancer. Detractors say that tampering with the telomeres will cause massive cancer. Those of us interested in achieving cellular immortality believe this is the key to regaining our natural heritage.”

  “Natural heritage?”

  “A biblical joke of sorts. The Garden of Eden, as it were,” Dr. J wagged his finger. “Live forever, heal forever. Our heritage before we crossed God. We could be immortal.”

  “Until someone with a gun comes along,” Behruse said, amused.

  “What?”

  “Your Dr. Sawad was murdered recently,” Sabeen said. “Pushed off a roof.”

  “I hadn’t heard,” Dr. J slumped in his chair. “That’s terrible.”

  “My sympathies…”

  “Oh, he was a prick. Destined to be murdered,” Dr. J said. “I don’t mean that. It’s terrible that he died without telling me whose blood work I’ve got.”

  “We know whose blood you’ve got.”

  “Well you need to bring the young man to me immediately.”

  “He ain’t young,” Behruse said.

  “You’re wrong,” Dr. J said. “He’s very young. His telomeres are pristine. In fact, he looks like he just stepped out of the Garden.”

  21: HAND IN THE JAR

  THE JAR WAS THICK PEBBLED GLASS, UNLABELLED, HOLDING about two liters of formaldehyde. A hand floated inside, ragged at the edges where the bones had been severed untidily, possibly using a cleaver. The chipped edges showed that at least two attempts had been made to effect the separation. Tinges of blood blushed the formaldehyde into a faint pink, a fairly pleasant color, notwithstanding the provenance.

  Mother Davala cradled the jar in her arms, as if it were an infant. Tears salted her cheeks in twin tracks, following the crevices of her ancient skin. It was an incongruous sight in that elegant living room, the jar and the crone. The other two ladies knitted silently, and even the click of their needles sounded mournful. Dagr felt a leaden sickness in his stomach, nausea rising. He could smell the blood suffocating him, although he knew it was no such thing. The hand, floating in its artificial womb, looked peculiarly feminine, reduced to a gentleness as if, detached from its host, it had reverted back to a prepubescent level of innocence.

  When he saw it, Dagr staggered in his step, for the lay of the hand, the angle of the fingers brought back something else in his mind, a black obscenity he had nearly blotted out. The day he had finally quit his home, had left the keys and all his possessions behind, walked out without even a change of clothes like a dervish in the storm.

  He remembered his wife’s hand, laying like that on their blue cotton coverlet, severed from life, unnaturally pale and elegant, the tidiness of her limbs on the bed, that grace following her to the afterlife, giving her dignity for a most undignified retreat. He had seen her hand first, the lovely tapered fingers, seen it faintly blue, the wedding band still on, and known the truth. The message was there in the arrangement of her intimate things, her chain, her watch, the wallet with their pictures, the rattle she carried of their baby girl, the little quirks; all wistful tokens of love for a lover who after all, in the very final reckoning, had not been enough.

  Dagr had left it all, but carried them still.

  “See what they’ve done,” Mother Davala said. “The poor boy.”

  “Whose hand is that?” Kinza asked quietly. Dagr could see the cold rage pouring out of him, waves and waves of it. It sobered him, gathered again the amorphous mush of his thoughts into the hard kernel of his core. It was not that hand. That one was buried.

  “Xervish,” Mother Davala said, “only poor Xervish.”

  “Are you sure?” Dagr forced himself to look. “I…I can’t remember what his hands look like.” I can only remember one kind of hand.

  “Put the phone down!” Hamid’s voice cracked out in parade ground volume, an authority to it Dagr had not heard in a long time.

  Kinza froze, his cell phone half way to his ear, eyes swiveling around, mildly surprised, yet Dagr was certain even without looking that his other hand was perilously close to his gun, indeed that he was moments away from blowing a hole in Hamid’s head. Hamid too sensed this perhaps, for his next words were low, and stark.

  “They have him. They have his cell phone. Your call can be traced back to here.”

  Kinza put down the phone slowly. “Is he dead?”

  “The cutting of limbs is a quirk of Salemi,” Mother Davala said. “He burns the ends to keep the body alive. He gives IV blood transfusions if necessary. If Xervish survived the initial shock, he might be alive.”

  “What next?”

  “Two, maybe three days later, another hand. Or foot.”

  “What does he want?” Dagr cried. “Is he mad? What possible use is this?”

  “He wants us,” Kinza said. “He wants me. We have two days, then. Where was this found?”

  “Outside the mosque,” Mother Davala said. “The cook brought it.”

  “Kinza?” Dagr asked. “Two days for what?”

  “To get him back,” Kinza said. “Or bury him if he’s dead.”

  “You’re mad,” Hamid cried. “Let it go, man. We have safe passage to Mosul! We can leave tomorrow. Xervish is dead. You think I haven’t cut off hands before? You don’t survive that, not without first class treatment.”

  “You can go,” Kinza said quietly. “I free you. Leave now. But you can’t use the American truck driver. I will need him.”

  “You’ll leave?”

  “No,” Kinza said. “He will get me close enough to Salemi.”

  “Why won’t you leave?” Hamid asked. There was something like anguish in his voice. “Xervish set it up. He wanted us to escape. We can be in Mosul in two days…among friends, among protectors. The gold is real. I swear to you.”

  “I said you were free.”

  “What about him?
” Hamid stabbed a finger toward Dagr, who sat mute, as he did in most times of crisis. “What about his life? You condemn him to death as surely as you do yourself.”

  “He will stay here,” Kinza smiled. “To avenge me if I fail.”

  “You’ll die alone then,” Hamid said.

  “Yes. One day. Not tomorrow.”

  “And he will never avenge anything. He is broken. He will die too. This house will burn.”

  “You misunderstand him.”

  “You’re a stubborn fool,” Hamid said.

  “I said you were free.”

  “You will die alone. Without witness.”

  “Not alone.” A ghastly smile.

  “Fuck you then,” Hamid said. “I’m not dying for that fool.”

  Kinza looked away, toward Mother Davala. It was as if Hamid no longer existed. “I’ll need more guns. Armor. Grenades.”

  “We need maps,” Dagr said. Reluctantly the shock faded from him, replaced with the tired, mundane necessities at hand. “And numbers of men, pictures of the building, and those around it.”

  “You had best stay behind,” Kinza said.

  “It seems like a two-man job.” More like ten men. Who cares?

  “Twenty men would be enough,” Hamid said bitterly.

  “Hassan Salemi does not hide in his own neighborhood,” Mother Davala showed her cracked gums. “He does not imagine anyone will have the affront to attack his house. The things you need will be provided.”

  “By whom, witch?” Kinza asked sharply. “What bargain do we make here?”

  “Do you think this is the first hand we’ve found in a jar?” Mother Davala said. “You will get what you need. The condition I have is for you alone.” She put her ruined mouth to his ear, whispered.

  “I agree,” Kinza laughed uproariously, with genuine amusement, a sound Dagr had not heard for a long time. “Get the stuff quickly. Pictures and information first.”

  “What does she want?” Dagr asked.

  “Later.”

  Later in the evening, Dagr, bewildered by the blistering speed of events, found himself once again in that faded drawing room, as a procession of nephews arrived, producing with miraculous regularity everything they had wanted. Chief among that was information. Hassan Salemi used a three-story compound as his office, which doubled as both arsenal and the legitimate face of his fledgling political party.

  Party members who were retired gunmen lounged there in varying numbers all day, providing a de facto security cordon. Salemi had been forced by the Iraqi police to remove his personal road block, but a number of old cars were regularly parked in haphazard fashion at the head of the street, cutting off ingress.

  These descriptions and more were forthcoming from a variety of brats up to age fifteen, all of whom claimed kinship to the old woman and were ruthlessly fed and watered in the house after their report, a few of them even forcibly bathed. No boys over fifteen, all dead or gone, Mother Davala cackled, and Dagr wondered how many of her kin she herself had spent on insanity like this.

  Within a few hours, Dagr’s head was swimming with crazy details. The man on the roof listened to radio all day and ate falafel. He had a big stick and binoculars. He had an air gun that he used to hit little kids monkeying around. Sniper? Sentry? Hassan’s doyen was a mute who had had his tongue removed by the Ba’athists. Your work, Hamid? He was fat and wore a black sweater, even in summer. Kevlar? The front door opened outward but was normally ajar all day. Can’t be kicked in. The party members sit on the street and smoke shisha all day and drink coffee. No day jobs. War veterans, probably deserted army personnel. Expect a quick recovery. In the back of the building, there is a window near the ground, with bars. Basement. Dungeon.

  “I have made a list,” Kinza said. “We need automatic weapons. A dozen grenades. Fragment, not smoke. Flares.”

  “Get a damn mortar, why not,” Hamid said.

  “The American takes us past the road block. They won’t like it, but they’ll have to let him through,” Kinza said. “We go in daylight. At night they don’t let anything through.”

  “There are men at the gate and on the roof,” Dagr said.

  “Grenades for the door,” Hamid said. “But the men on the roof will shoot you down. Abandon this idiocy for God’s sake.”

  “The roof,” Kinza said, “is a problem.”

  “You need to hit the roof simultaneously,” Hamid said, dragged in. “A sniper on the top, opposite, if you can get up there. Or something heavy, like a bomb or mortar. Get them looking in another direction.”

  “Very good if we had more men,” Kinza said. “We wear Kevlar. We’ll probably get hit, but if it’s not a headshot, it won’t matter.”

  “Even if you get in the door,” Hamid said, “the building will be crawling with men.”

  “We take our chances.”

  “And how do we get out?”

  Dagr looked at Kinza, saw the momentary blankness on his face, and laughed. “We don’t worry about that, Hamid.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t worry,” Dagr said, “because we won’t come out. You think he’s ever worried about something trivial like getting out? We kill them all, or not. And then it’s over.”

  “You’re insane.”

  Dagr shrugged. “It’s his plan. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “You’re both crazy,” Hamid moved toward Kinza, grabbed his shoulder. “You don’t care? You’d die for this piece of shit Xervish? I don’t understand. Why? What sense does it make? You want to die? You want to kill all of us? Fuck you.”

  “This Salemi,” Kinza said. “He thinks he’s safe. Not from me. Xervish. I saw his sister die in front of me. Someone put his hand in a jar. I’ve had enough. I won’t let it go. You run away if you like.”

  “Oh why the hell not?” Hamid slumped in his chair, “Fuck Mosul then. How far will I make it alone? Let’s kill the Shi’a bastards. I hate them all. Not you, Dagr.”

  “You coming then?” Kinza asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Bring your toolkit,” Kinza said. “How are you at working on the run? We might have to ask some questions.”

  “I was known as Two-Minute Hamid at the academy,” Hamid said. “And they weren’t talking about my cock either.”

  “At last, you’ll be useful.”

  “Kinza, what did Mother whisper to you?” Dagr asked.

  “That witch?” Kinza smiled. “After I die, she wants my soul—to keep in a jar, apparently.”

  22: MEETING OF THE MINDS

  LIFE FOR YAKIN HAD NOT GENERALLY IMPROVED AFTER HIS CONVERSION from independent street thug to devout Shi’a. The first few days, he had been merely happy to be alive and thus found profundity in the simple pleasures of eating, sleeping, and watching sunsets. This affliction had passed, however, as it became apparent that the imam had adopted him as a sort of pet dog.

  It was now borne on him that he would not be shot for sport, but rather, only if he transgressed in anyway. This had first engendered a spineless relief in him, pushing him into a deep lethargy. Now, however, even that had gone away, and he was merely bored and vaguely dissatisfied.

  Contrary to his previous beliefs, members of the imam’s gang did not get a lot of pussy. In fact, sex of any sort except with your wife was strictly forbidden. The imam was big on the forms of religion. Prayers had to be said on time, cleanliness had to be maintained, proper attire had to be worn, foul language, drinking, gambling, womanizing were all prohibited. Yakin had been tempted to point out that shooting people and cutting off limbs would probably also be frowned upon by the Prophet.

  As he was propelled into the vortex of the imam’s compulsions, it became apparent, too, that his master was insane. It was not the sort of insanity that impinged on competency but, rather, the scouring, scourging hot breath of madness that purified the world into a single terrifying image, like the barbed tongue of a lion scraping off the ghostly remnants of fur, skin, and meat from bleached-whi
te bone. His problem was that he believed. Not in the lapsed, socially compressed half-assed way of Yakin, not in the going through the motions just-in-case hypocrisy of bankers and accountants, not in the passive dumb acceptance of the elderly, but rather in some mad, specific vision that he alone saw, some coruscating alternate truth that allowed him to deliver judgments from immense height with impunity.

  This frightened Yakin greatly because, of course, he could find no rational basis for anticipating the whims of the imam. The rest of the crew, he knew, was in a similar dilemma, divided roughly in two. There were the opportunist pretenders, similar to himself, and then there were the other nutcase believers, those touched with a sort of associated, lesser madness, a convergence of visions, perhaps, overlapping slightly or entirely with the engine that drove Salemi. In either case, these days, attrition at the house Salemi was high.

  As a favored pet, Yakin followed in the imam’s wake, particularly in the current pursuit, where the obsession for vengeance had overtaken his mind, leading him into foxholes deep within the city. One such day, it brought them to an ancient neighborhood of arching masonry, close-set walls, and unfriendly faces. They were admitted into one such house, although the pruned caretaker, through a toothless ruin of a mouth, made it known that only two would be permitted.

  To his surprise, then, Yakin was prodded forward by Salemi, causing his heart to flutter like a defective alarm clock. It was a strange place for an execution, but he was now so inured to the irrational turns of Salemi’s mind that he could only stumble forward with a litany of half-remembered prayers. The inside of this house, however, proved to be largely inoffensive. A narrow corridor, and then an antechamber, bare with polished marble, and then another turn into a little courtyard, beautifully paved, with the air of antiquity about it, a pocket time capsule a thousand years old, reminiscent of the glory days of Baghdad, when the city sported innumerous pleasure gardens and a generally decadent air.

  There was a stunted olive tree, and underneath it sat an old man smoking a cigarette. It wasn’t a regular filter tip cigarette but rather, one of those long, hand-rolled ones in fancy brown paper, with a holder made of horn or ivory or something, a bit of detail that absolutely oozed wealth and class. Yakin hated him already, and as he got closer, something naked in the man’s face shivered a thrill of ice down his spine, reverting him to instant caution mode, which was pretty much a semicomatose state of inaction and bubbling panic. With the unerring instinct of a lifetime bully, he registered instantly that this old man was neither paternal nor kindly. He felt caught between two starving wolves and understood that he himself was just a piece of disguised meat.