Alif the Unseen (2 page)

Dina was already on the roof when he got there. She faced the sea, or what would be the sea if it were visible through the tangle of apartment buildings to the east.

“What do you want?” Alif asked.

She turned and tilted her head, brows contracting in the slim vent of her face-veil.

“To return your book,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” He made an irritated gesture. “Give me the book then.”

Dina reached into her robe and drew out a battered copy of
The Golden Compass
. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I thought?” she demanded.

“I don’t care. The English was probably too difficult for you.”

“It was no such thing. I understood every word. This book”—she waved it in the air—“is full of pagan images. It’s dangerous.”

“Don’t be ignorant. They’re metaphors. I told you you wouldn’t understand.”

“Metaphors are dangerous. Calling something by a false name changes it, and metaphor is just a fancy way of calling something by a false name.”

Alif snatched the book from her hand. There was a hiss of fabric as Dina tucked her chin, eyes disappearing beneath her lashes. Though he had not seen her face in nearly ten years, Alif knew she
was pouting.

“I’m sorry,” he said, pressing the book to his chest. “I’m not feeling well today.”

Dina was silent. Alif looked impatiently over her shoulder: he could see a section of the Old Quarter glimmering on a rise beyond the shoddy collection of residential neighborhoods around them.
Intisar was somewhere within it, like a pearl embedded in one of the ancient mollusks the
ghataseen
sought along the beaches that kissed its walls. Perhaps she was working on her senior
thesis, poring over books of early Islamic literature; perhaps she was taking a swim in the sandstone pool in the courtyard of her father’s villa. Perhaps she was thinking of him.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” said Dina.

Alif blinked. “Say anything about what?” he asked.

“Our maid overheard the neighbors talking in the souk yesterday. They said your mother is still secretly a Hindu. They claim they saw her buying
puja
candles from that shop in
Nasser Street.”

Alif stared at her, muscles working in his jaw. Abruptly he turned and walked across the dusty rooftop, past their satellite dishes and potted plants, and did not stop when Dina called him by
his given name.

* * *

In the kitchen, his mother stood side by side with their maid, chopping green onions. Sweat stood out where the
salwar kameez
she wore exposed the first few vertebrae
of her back.

“Mama.” Alif touched her shoulder.

“What is it,
makan
?” Her knife did not pause as she spoke.

“Do you need anything?”

“What a question. Have you eaten?”

Alif sat at their small kitchen table and watched as the maid wordlessly set a plate of food in front of him.

“Was that Dina you were talking to on the roof?” his mother asked, scraping the mound of onions into a bowl.

“So?”

“You shouldn’t. Her parents will be wanting to marry her off soon. Good families won’t like to hear she’s been hanging around with a strange boy.”

Alif made a face. “Who’s strange? We’ve been living in the same stupid duplex since we were kids. She used to play in my room.”

“When you were five years old! She’s a woman now.”

“She probably still has the same big nose.”

“Don’t be cruel,
makan-jan
. It’s unattractive.”

Alif pushed the food around on his place. “I could look like Amr Diab and it wouldn’t matter,” he muttered.

His mother turned to look at him, a frown distorting her round face. “Really, such a childish attitude. If you would only settle down into a real career and save some money, there are
thousands of lovely Indian girls who would be honored to—”

“But not Arab girls.”

The maid sucked her teeth derisively.

“What’s so special about Arab girls?” his mother asked. “They give themselves airs and walk around with their eyes painted up like cabaret dancers, but they’re
nothing without their money. Not beautiful, not clever, and not one of them can cook—”

“I don’t want a cook!” Alif pushed his chair back. “I’m going upstairs.”

“Good! Take your plate with you.”

Alif jerked his plate off the table, sending the fork skittering to the floor. He stepped over the maid as she bent to pick it up.

Back in his room, he examined himself in the mirror. Indian and Arab blood had merged pleasantly on his face, at least. His skin was an even bronze color. His eyes took after the Bedouin side of
his family, his mouth the Dravidian; all in all he was at peace with his chin. Yes, pleasant enough, but he would never pass for a full-blooded Arab. Nothing less than full-blood, inherited from a
millennium of sheikhs and emirs, was enough for Intisar.

“A real career,” Alif said to his reflection, echoing his mother. In the mirror he saw his computer monitor flicker to life. He frowned, watching as a readout began to scroll up the
screen, tracking the IP address and usage statistics of whoever was attempting to break through his encryption software. “Who’s come poking around my house? Naughty naughty.” He
sat at his desk and studied the flat screen—almost new, flawless aside from a tiny crack he had repaired himself; bought for cheap from Abdullah at Radio Sheikh. The intruder’s IP
address came from a server in Winnipeg and this was his first attempt to break into Alif’s operating system. Curiosity, then. In all likelihood the prowler was a gray hat like himself. After
testing Alif’s defenses for two minutes he gave up, but not before executing Pony Express, a trojan Alif had hidden in what looked like an encryption glitch. If he was half good, the
intruder likely ran specialized anti-malware programs several times a day, but with any luck Alif would have a few hours to track his Internet browsing habits.

Alif turned on a small electric fan near his foot and aimed it at the computer tower. The CPU had been running hot; last week he’d come close to melting the motherboard. He could not
afford to be lax. Even a day offline might endanger his more notorious clients. The Saudis had been after Jahil69 for years, furious that his amateur erotica site was impossible to block and had
more daily visitors than any other Web service in the Kingdom. In Turkey, TrueMartyr and Umar_Online fomented Islamic revolution from a location the authorities in Ankara found difficult to
pinpoint. Alif was not an ideologue; as far as he was concerned, anyone who could pay for his protection was entitled to it.

It was the censors who made him grind his teeth as he slept, the censors who smothered all enterprise, whether saintly or cynical. Half the world lived under their digital cloud of ones and
zeroes, denied free access to the economy of information. Alif and his friends read the complaints of their coddled American and British counterparts—activists, all talk, irritated by some
new piece of digital monitoring legislation or another—and laughed. Ignorant monoglots, Abdullah called them when he was in the mood to speak English. They had no idea what it was like to
operate in the City, or any city that did not come prewrapped in sanitary postal codes and tidy laws. They had no idea what it was like to live in a place that boasted one of the most sophisticated
digital policing systems in the world, but no proper mail service. Emirates with princes in silver-plated cars and districts with no running water. An Internet where every blog, every chat room,
every forum is monitored for illegal expressions of distress and discontent.

Their day will come, Abdullah had told him once. They had been smoking a well-packed hookah on the back stoop of Radio Sheikh, watching a couple of feral cats breed on a garbage heap. They will
wake up one morning and realize their civilization has been pulled out from under them, inch by inch, dollar by dollar, just as ours was. They will know what it is to have been asleep for the most
important century of their history.

That doesn’t help us, Alif had said.

No, said Abdullah, but it certainly makes me feel better.

Meanwhile they had their local nightmares to occupy them. In university, frustrated by the gaps in a computer science curriculum taught by the very State servants who policed the digital
landscape, Alif had weaned himself on spite. He would teach himself what they wouldn’t. He would help inundate their servers with sex videos or bring the soldiers of God down on their
heads—it did not matter which came first. Better chaos than slow suffocation.

Only five years ago—less—the censors had been sluggish, relying on social media sites and old-fashioned detective work to track their marks. Gradually they had been endowed with some
unholy knowledge. Chatter began on countless mainframes: who had tutored them? The CIA? Mossad was more likely; the CIA was not bright enough to choose such a subtle means of demoralizing the
digital peasantry. They were united by no creed, these censors; they were Ba’ath in Syria, secular in Tunisia, Salafi in Saudi Arabia. Yet their methods were as identical as their goals were
disparate. Discover, dismantle, subdue.

In the City, the increase in Internet policing appeared as a bizarre singularity. It moved over the weblogs and forums of the disaffected like a fog, appearing sometimes as code glitch or a
server malfunction, sometimes as a sudden drop in connection speeds. It took months for Alif and the other City gray hats to connect these ordinary-seeming events. Meanwhile, the Web hosting
accounts of some of the City’s finest malcontents were discovered and hacked—presumably by the government—leaving them unable to access their own Web sites. Before he left the
digital ecosystem for good, NewQuarter01, the City’s first blogger, named the singularity the Hand of God. Debate still raged about its identity: was it a program, a person, many people? Some
postulated that the Hand was the emir himself—hadn’t it always been said that His Highness was schooled in national security by the Chinese, authors of the Golden Shield? Whatever its
origin, Alif foresaw disaster in this new wave of regional monitoring. Hacked accounts were only the first step. Inevitably, the censors would move on to hack lives.

Like all things, like civilization itself, the arrests began in Egypt. In the weeks leading up to the Revolution, the digital stratosphere became a war zone. The bloggers who used free software
platforms were most vulnerable; Alif was neither surprised nor impressed when they were found and imprisoned. Then the more enterprising geeks, the ones who coded their own sites, began to
disappear. When the violence spilled off the Internet and into the streets, making the broad avenues of Tahrir Square a killing field, Alif dumped his Egyptian clientele without ceremony. It was
clear the regime in Cairo had outstripped his ability to digitally conceal its dissidents. Cut off the arm to save the body, he told himself. If the name Alif was leaked to an ambitious State
security official, a coterie of bloggers, pornographers, Islamists, and activists from Palestine to Pakistan would be put at risk. It was not his own skin he was worried about, of course, though he
didn’t take a solid shit for a week afterward. Of course it was not his own skin.

Then on Al Jazeera he watched as friends known to him only by alias were taken to jail, victims of the regime’s last death throes. They had faces, always different than the ones he
imagined, older or younger or startlingly pale, bearded, laugh-lined. One was even a girl. She would probably be raped in her prison cell. She was probably a virgin, and she would probably be
raped.

Cut off the arm.

Alif’s fingers glided over the keyboard. “Metaphors,” he said. He typed it in English. Dina was right as usual.

It was for this reason that Alif had taken no pleasure in the success of the Egyptian revolution, or in the wave of uprisings that followed. The triumphs of his faceless colleagues, who had
crashed system after system in government after government, served only to remind him of his own cowardice. The City, once one tyrannical emirate among many, began to feel as though it were outside
time: a memory of an old order, or a dream from which its inhabitants had failed to wake. Alif and his friends fought on, chipping away at the digital fortress the Hand had erected to protect the
emir’s rotting government. But an aura of failure clung to their efforts. History had left them behind.

A flicker of green out of the corner of his eye: Intisar was online. Alif let out a breath and felt his guts working.

For a leaden minute she wrote nothing. Alif leaned his forehead against the edge of his desk, waiting for the ping that would tell him she had responded.

* * *

He took a taxi to the farthest edge of the Old Quarter wall and then got out to walk. The wall was thronged with tourists. Sunset turned its translucent stones brilliant pink, a
phenomenon they would try imperfectly to capture with their mobile phones and digital cameras. Souvenir hawkers and tea shops crowded the street that ran alongside. Alif pushed his way past a group
of Japanese women in identical T-shirts. Someone nearby stank of beer. He bit back a cry of frustration as his path was blocked by a tall
desi
guide carrying a flag.

“Please to look left! Hundred year ago, this wall surrounded entire city. Tourist then came not by plane but by camel! Imagine to come across the desert, then suddenly—the sea! And
on the sea, city surrounded by wall of quartz, like mirage. They thought was mirage!”