Alif the Unseen

“You can’t be NewQuarter. NewQuarter is a—he’s a—”

  “A peasant, like the rest of you? Oh good. I was hoping I’d managed to fit in. I didn’t want to seem like some kind of poser. Even though I suppose that’s what I am.” NewQuarter put one hand under Alif ’s elbow and helped him sit back down.

  “You really look a mess. I didn’t expect them to have taken your clothes—I’ll have to go back for some. My stuff will probably be too short for you, but it’ll do until we’ve sprung you out of here.”

  “We’ve what?” Alif shifted to take the weight off his bruised buttocks.

  “Don’t be dense. I’ve come to rescue you.” NewQuarter set the flashlight on its end, throwing a bluish glow across the ceiling.

  Alif gasped, bit his lip, and began to bawl. NewQuarter’s mouth twisted into an expression of repressed horror. He patted Alif ’s shoulder awkwardly.

  “I don’t—I’m not really good with crying, I have to warn you. Especially not when the guy in question is naked and filthy.”

  “I’m sorry,” sniffled Alif. “It’s only that I thought I was going to die in here.”

  “If you don’t eat something, you still might.” NewQuarter produced a bar of chocolate from the pocket of his robe. “Here, take this.”

  Hands shaking, Alif unwrapped the chocolate bar and bit off one corner. The substance was rich and almost too sweet to swallow.

  “Thank you,” he said around a mouthful.

  “I’ll bring something more substantial next time,” said NewQuarter. “I should go now before the guards come back.”

  “How many are there? How’d you get them to leave?”

  NewQuarter sat back on his heels with a tense smile.

  “There are five stationed in this corridor. Two on either end and one in the middle. Fortunately they keep women in the cells opposite you—I told them I wanted some time alone with one of them. They just gave me the keys and took a cigarette break.”

  Alif shuddered.

  “They let you do that? Just like so?”

  NewQuarter looked away. The cynical set of his mouth made him seem older than he probably was.

  “There are some very well-paid sheikhs who say captive women—prisoners—are like slaves from a shari’ah point of view. So their liege-lords have the right to fuck them. If you’ve got a title you can pretty much walk in and out of this place whenever you want.”

  The thought of Dina being forced to submit to some aristocratic lecher made Alif nauseous. Vikram had been right to take the girls into hiding, despite the risk—and the cost. Alif swallowed the syrupy liquid that rose in his throat. How awful that the man’s nobility was apparent only now that he was dead.

  “I know,” said NewQuarter in a quiet, distracted voice, watching Alif catch his breath. “Makes you want to break things. That’s why I started hacking. I didn’t want to be on the wrong team.” He stood and gingerly shook out his robe, looking around himself with faint disgust.

  “I hope you haven’t picked up some horrible disease in here, because you’re not bringing it home with me. I’ll be back tomorrow. Your job is to stay alive until then.”

  Alif looked at him with speechless gratitude. NewQuarter smiled and touched his forehead in an old-fashioned salaam, turning toward the door. As he left, Alif remembered something.

  “Sheikh Bilal!” he called. “We can’t leave without him. Please—”

  NewQuarter paused, frowning.

  “What’s this? Who’s Sheikh Bilal? I didn’t plan for more than one person.”

  Alif rose to his feet again, swaying a little, and looked NewQuarter in the eye.

  “He’s the imam of Al Basheera and very old, and they’ve been torturing him for information he doesn’t have. The Hand said he’s down the hall. The man risked his life protecting me—I can’t possibly leave him behind.”

  “Can’t possibly?”

  Alif shook his head.

  “Can’t possibly. Not an option.”

  NewQuarter sighed in irritation.

  “All right. Let me recalibrate a little. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He turned again to leave.

  “What time of day is it?” Alif asked him in a rush. “What month? What’s the weather like?”

  NewQuarter smiled sweetly.

  “It’s about 10PM on a balmy winter evening in late January.”

  Alif closed his eyes, face slack with relief.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  * * *

  Alif ’s perception of time returned with excruciating suddenness. If it was late January, he had been in the Hand’s custody for almost three months, a period that seemed by turns unthinkable and blessedly short. The day that remained until NewQuarter’s return ballooned before him, longer than any of the undifferentiated periods of sleep and wakefulness he had experienced in the dark. The sugar in his stomach made him jumpy, and his pulse raced; sleep would not come to him. He paced the room, walking back and forth on sore feet.

  An attempt to count seconds quickly frustrated him. He focused instead on his breathing, remembering some rubbish or other he’d seen on Rotana about relaxation techniques, and thought with bliss that he might be very close to that life again; to the privilege of waking up to trivial nonsense on television. He made a mental list of the Egyptian daytime dramas he would watch when he was free. All the motherdaughter cat fights, melodramatic close-ups, and plot lines so wretchedly thin you could recite whole monologues before the actors spoke them; they had disgusted him once, convinced him of the superiority of his mind. Now they were humbling reminders of a safer world.

  As the day drew on, he grew tense. He imagined it was almost dawn, but still could not sleep; though he could finally guess what time it was, the vagaries of the sun had long lost their impact on his body. He began to sing again. He sang the old Alexandrian fishing songs Dina liked, about painted boats and the safety of the ancient harbor, and beyond it, the once-fruitful Mediterranean. She would sing these to herself on the roof when she set out the laundry and thought no one was listening; Alif could hear her voice drifting down through his window, deepening and softening over the years as she grew to womanhood. He wondered how it was that she still felt such a connection to Egypt, a place she had not lived since she was an infant. Perhaps they should spend some time there together after they were married. They could rent an apartment overlooking the port in Alexandria, with a balcony where Dina could sit in the sun bareheaded. He would ask her. There were, perhaps, parts of her he still did not understand, desirous of things he could not guess, though he had known her all his life.

  Daydreaming about Dina and a country he had never seen, Alif drifted off. He woke again with a prescient feeling, and moments later heard a key turn in the lock. NewQuarter slipped inside.

  “Thank God,” breathed Alif. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy to see anyone as I am to see you. I’m so—”

  “Yes yes, you’re welcome. Let’s not get carried away.” NewQuarter set a loaded backpack on the floor. “There are clothes in here. I brought an extra set for your friend. Both thobes. I hope you don’t mind. We don’t wear much western clothing in my family.”

  “I’m not about to complain.” Alif unzipped the backpack and pulled out a white robe similar to the one NewQuarter was wearing. It smelled dazzlingly clean.

  “There’s a head cloth too—better wear it, you look like a homeless person. If I’m going to drive you out of here in a BMW we need a certain amount of plausibility.”

  “We’re driving out of here in a BMW?”

  “I thought about bringing the Lexus,” fretted NewQuarter without irony, “but a BMW is more anonymous. All the princes drive them.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hurry, will you? If we’re going to pick up this sheikh we need to move.”

  Alif pulled the robe over his head. It felt like a bandage on his abused skin, which had gone scaly in some places and tender in others. NewQuarter briskly arranged the head cloth over Alif ’s brow and h
eld it in place with two circlets of black braided cotton.

  “Good God,” he said, “You still look a mess. Oh well. Just keep the edges of the head cloth low around your face and don’t say anything. Your accent will give you away. There’s a whiff of Indian menial in your Arabic.”

  Alif nodded obediently. NewQuarter slipped through the open door and glanced down the hallway, holding his flashlight at shoulder height.

  “Okay,” he said, “Let’s go.”

  Alif followed him into the hall. A desperate euphoria rushed over him as NewQuarter quietly shut the door of his cell. The uncertainty of being free and not yet safe was too much. He steadied himself, blinking to dispel the onset of dizziness.

  “Know which cell this guy is in? Are we really going to wander up and down calling his name through the food slots on every door?” NewQuarter swung the flashlight in an arc along the doors lining the corridor.

  Alif prodded his still-sluggish brain.

  “You said there are women on the other side, right? So that narrows it down.”

  “I suppose so. There are still six other doors on this side, though.”

  Alif glanced up and down and bit his lip.

  “We couldn’t just open them all up? On both sides. The women—” He couldn’t finish his sentence.

  NewQuarter tapped the flashlight against his leg.

  “I know,” he said quietly. “But to be honest with you, Alif, the more we play liberating heroes the less our chances of getting out of here ourselves. If only two of you go missing, the guards may not notice for several hours. If we instigate a jail break there will be immediate chaos. How are we supposed to extricate ourselves from that?”

  “For God’s sake,” said Alif, “Isn’t this what we’re meant to do? Or what was all our messing around with computers for? Fun? Aren’t we meant to believe in something?”

  “They’ll all be caught again anyway. You can’t just walk out of here, Alif—there are walls six feet thick topped with razor wire, and beyond that, eighty kilometers of desert between us and the City. And as you well know, most of the people in these cells are probably not in the best of health.”

  Alif gazed at the rows of steel-doored cells that flickered in the beam of NewQuarter’s flashlight. He felt lightheaded.

  “We’re really going to leave them?” he asked in a softer voice.

  “We don’t have a choice. You’re of more help to these people out of jail than in, ahki.” NewQuarter moved down the hallway and tapped on the cell door next to Alif ’s.

  “Sheikh Bilal?” he called softly. A voice inside murmured a timid negative. The next two cells yielded similar results. When he tapped on the fourth, a familiar voice rasped out a curse in flowery, classical Arabic.

  “That’s him,” murmured Alif. NewQuarter produced a large ring of keys and sorted through them, flashlight balanced in the crook of his arm. Selecting one, he turned it in the lock and pulled the heavy door open. Alif crowded over his shoulder to look inside: Sheikh Bilal, wrinkled and emaciated, blinked bloodshot eyes in the glare of the flashlight. Alif felt a rush of embarrassment for the older man, whose rank made his nakedness somehow more grotesque. The sight of his bare head made Alif wince; to see the spotted, balding pate of a sheikh, fringed with white hair, bereft of the dignity of even a skullcap, unnerved him. He could not bring himself to speak.

  “Here, uncle,” said NewQuarter, awkwardly holding out his backpack. “There are clothes inside. I’ve got water and food waiting. But we don’t have much time.”

  Sheikh Bilal took the backpack with shaking hands.

  “What is this?” he croaked. “Is this one of your dog-cursed tricks?”

  “It’s not a trick, Sheikh uncle,” said Alif, voice catching in his throat. “NewQuarter is from the royal family. He’s here to spring us.”

  Sheikh Bilal attempted to spit. A clot of drool ran down his chin.

  “Any shred of loyalty I might have felt to the royal family died in this cell,” he said. “I don’t want anything from those inbred bastards.”

  “And you won’t get anything,” said NewQuarter with a wry smile, “just me. One inbred bastard with a vendetta.”

  The sheikh peered up at NewQuarter.

  “How do I know you won’t simply deliver me to a worse fate than this?” he asked.

  NewQuarter shrugged. “You don’t. I didn’t come here for you, I came here for Alif. He’s the one who insisted he couldn’t leave without you.”

  The sheikh turned his bleary eyes on Alif.

  “So you’re alive,” he muttered. “Much good may it do you.”

  “I’m sorry Sheikh uncle,” said Alif, “I’m so sorry.”

  Sheikh Bilal said nothing. NewQuarter glanced from the younger man to the elder one and slipped his arm under the sheikh’s elbow.

  “You can scream at him later. Right now we’ve got to leave. Let me help you get dressed.”

  * * *

  They slipped down the corridor in single file. Alif ached at each door they passed, thinking of the silent inmates behind them. He thought he heard a muffled cry issue from a food slot near the end of the hall and stopped.

  “We can’t just—”

  “Yes we can,” said NewQuarter firmly. “There is nothing we can do for them, Alif, nothing, not from in here.”

  Alif trailed after him, straining for another sound, but heard none. At the end of the hall, NewQuarter paused with his hand on the lever of a large metal door.

  “The guards will be waiting at the bottom of the stairs,” he muttered. “That’s the way out. Wait here while I send them for my car. I’ll knock on the outer door when it’s safe.”

  Alif was incredulous.

  “The prison guards are going to bring your car around like a bunch of valets?”

  “You’d better believe it.” NewQuarter grinned and disappeared into the stairwell on the opposite side of the door. Sheikh Bilal quaked, wobbling on his feet; Alif took his arm to steady him.

  “Forgive me,” Alif whispered.

  The sheikh snorted.

  “I have no breath left to waste. Talk to me again when I’ve eaten.”

  Alif looked away, face burning. They stood in silence for several more minutes, jumping at echoes from other wings of the prison. Finally the sound of a well-oiled motor became audible. Three sharp knocks followed, rattling up the stairwell beyond the door. Alif felt his palms begin to sweat.

  “Let’s go,” he said, pushing open the door. Sheikh Bilal needed help getting down the soldered metal stairs. Alif prevented himself from screaming in frustration, gamely lending the old man his hands. At the bottom of the stairs, Alif pushed open a very heavy door, tasting night air, deep and clean and cool.

  “Now,” hissed NewQuarter from the interior of a black town car, “Now now now.”

  Alif bundled the sheikh into the back seat before climbing in the passenger door.

  “In the name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” said NewQuarter, gunning the motor. Alif slid down in his seat, heart pounding. NewQuarter pulled the car around the exterior of a windowless, dun-colored building. It took Alif a moment to realize that this was where he had been living for the past three months; that this was the shape of his lightless hell. It seemed both surreal and alarmingly ordinary, like an office building that had blinked, obscuring visual access to its innards.

  The building was surrounded by a paved courtyard that ended at the foot of a high wall, two stories perhaps, topped with ugly jumbles of wire. Pairs of security personnel patrolled the inner perimeter on horseback. With detached anxiety, Alif observed that the horses of each duo matched: a pair of black ones, a pair of reddish ones, a sandy-colored pair with white manes and tails. This seemed, to him, the final perversity: matched horses at the gate of an abattoir. He closed his eyes. His head was pounding, as if the blood vessels in his brain had swelled.

  “Here we go,” murmured NewQuarter. They were approaching a barred metal gate. There was a guard on either
end, each armed with an automatic rifle. NewQuarter slowed the car.

  “Oh captain!” he called through his window, snapping his fingers at the guard on the left. “Open up, I’m finished here.”

  The guard scurried up to the driver’s side window of the car.

  “Yes, sir. Right away sir,” he said. His eyes flickered over Alif in the passenger’s seat. Alif looked dead ahead.

  “I’m sorry, sir—these men—”

  “Are my personal attendants,” NewQuarter snapped. “You think I drive around by myself like some delivery boy?”

  “No, sir, of course not. It’s only that—there is a certain smell—”

  “Who wouldn’t smell after spending an hour in this filthy place? Open the gate.”

  The guard backed away, muttering into the walkie talkie hanging from his shirtfront. Motioning to the guard opposite, he pressed a series of numbers into a keypad on the edge of the gate. The metal bar began to rise.

  “Thank God,” said NewQuarter. “I swear I’ve sweat all the way through my thobe.”

  As the gate opened, NewQuarter inched the car forward. Alif heard Sheikh Bilal breathe out a sigh. Alif ’s shoulders ached; he realized he had been tensing them since before they left the prison.

  “And that, my friends,” said NewQuarter triumphantly, pressing a button to roll up his window, “is how you break out of prison.”

  There was a flicker of black in the rearview mirror. Alif frowned: a guard was running toward them from the direction of the prison complex, waving his arms angrily. Through the tinted, insulated glass, Alif couldn’t hear what he was saying. He turned his head to see the guard at the gate jamming a red button on the bottom of the keypad.

  The gate began to close.

  “Shit!” There was a squeal of rubber as NewQuarter jammed his foot against the accelerator. The car shot forward. Alif heard a series of loud pops. Swiveling in his seat, he saw the guard on the other end of the gate level his rifle at the car.

  “They’re shooting at us!” Alif shrieked. He fell back in his seat as the car swerved, skidding on sand that had blown across the road that rose in front of them. NewQuarter was hunched over the wheel, gritting his teeth. From the back seat, Alif heard Sheikh Bilal begin to mutter an incantatory prayer, asking God to protect them from the evil of His creation.