Alif the Unseen (28 page)

“Get up. I want to look you in the face.”

Alif struggled to his feet. The room, he now saw, was a bare concrete box, whitewashed with some kind of cheap paint that bore the smudged and foul-looking imprints of dirty fingers and blood
and perhaps worse. There was a drain in one corner—not, he realized with regret, the corner he had been using as a urinal.

The man in the white
thobe
watched him with a critical air.

“You look younger than I expected. I know your birth date, naturally—nevertheless, I anticipated you would appear mature for your age. But you haven’t even really filled out
yet.”

Alif remembered his nakedness and flushed, attempting to turn away and hide his most vulnerable parts. There was no manful way to go about it.

“Please don’t bother,” said the white-robed figure. “This is standard operating procedure. Very effective—isolation, no light, no clothing. We don’t even have
to touch people much, these days. Of course, there are exceptions. Some of the more emphatic religious types have been through psychological training, quite rigorous stuff. Impressive really. But
every man has his limits.”

Alif blinked at him stupidly.

“Every woman as well,” the man continued, running one finger along the wall and rubbing the chalky residue of the paint against his thumb. “But then, God made woman perversely
easy to brutalize, didn’t He? It does seem unfair. Don’t you agree?”

Alif opened and closed his mouth, wondering whether there was some sort of implied threat in the question.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said finally. His voice was hoarse. He was afraid he might start crying again, and gritted his teeth.

“You wouldn’t know.” The man chuckled. “You’re quite a boy. I’m a little disappointed—one wants to feel respect for one’s enemy. Especially one as
talented as you have proven yourself to be. I’m surprised she became attached to you. I would expect her to have better taste.”

“She?”

“I can see the mental lethargy has begun to set in. Well and good. Intisar, Alif. You do remember Intisar? I hope you do, since you have had from her that which was due to me by right. One
of us ought to have gotten some pleasure or pride out of it.”

Alif felt his heart jump. He felt thwarted, standing there ridiculous and unclothed; he had always imagined this moment with his hands around the throat of the man standing before him.

“It’s you,” he rasped. “You’re him. You’re the Hand.”

The man smiled.

“If you wish. I’ve never liked that name, flattering as it is. It’s a little overblown. You dissident types do enjoy your amateur theatrics.”

“You—you’re—” Alif shook with fury. He knew no curses vile enough.

“The son of a dog, a whore, or what? I’ve heard it all. Let’s skip that and be civil. There will come a point, very soon, when your anger will burn off and be replaced by
desperation. You’ll be groveling at my feet, and in such an attitude you’ll wish you’d kept a polite tongue in your head. I’m doing you a favor by warning you
now.”

“I don’t need any warning, you pig-eating ass-coveter.”

“Creative, very creative. You see how fast one’s mental faculties return when the lights come back on? Light stimulates all the hot spots in the frontal lobe. Without it, even the
most civilized philosopher is at the mercy of his primitive brain. I’ve seen respected university professors lose the power of speech after a few months in here. It even works on the blind,
if you can believe that. They can’t see the light but their brains still perceive it at some level. Unless they’ve been recently blinded—no long-term neural adaptation in that
case. Speeds things up tremendously.”

Alif felt several of his bodily organs recoil.

“How long have I been in here?” he asked in a different tone.

The Hand chuckled. “If I told you that, it would undo all the good work you’ve already put into your own psychological deconstruction.”

“What do you want from me?”

The Hand’s smile faded. “What a banal question,” he said softly. With one hand he adjusted the pointed edge of his head covering. He held it between his fingers for a moment
with an expression Alif couldn’t read, examining a crease in the white cloth. “How long have we been playing this game, Alif? Back and forth, State and insurgency, firewalls and
viruses. Your entire adult life. Many precious years of mine. No progress, no victory for either side. Finally, I thought I had an edge; I knew
The Thousand Days
was real, and I had a
powerful intuition—a vision, almost—about what I could do with it. Those hash-smoking medieval mystics didn’t really understand what they meant when they talked about the
Philosopher’s Stone. They didn’t have the same intellectual or technological resources we do. The human mind isn’t set up to make as many calculations as you would need for a
multivalent coded manuscript like
The Days
useful in any way. But a computer is.”

“It didn’t work,” said Alif.

The Hand ignored him. He studied Alif with detached curiosity, his eyes lingering on the younger man’s nicked, stubbled chin.

“ We all get off on the same thing, that’s the problem,” he said. “You don’t really care about revolution, I don’t really care about the State. What gets us
hard is the code itself. I created what I believed to be the most beautiful suite of security programs ever made, a continuation of the sinews of my own flesh, in some way. I thought that was
winning. It certainly helped me track down a lot of your friends. But never you—you remained maddeningly hidden. And then you stole the greatest idea I’d ever had, and used it to
destroy my life’s work.”

“I’m better than you,” Alif said, slurring his words. He wondered whether the Hand was right about the effect of light on his mind.

“I think you’re probably right,” said the Hand, without apparent offense. “For me programming was never an intuitive process. I studied very hard while all my classmates
slacked off, knowing that government jobs were waiting for them whether they did well in school or not. I wasn’t different because I had any special gift for computers—I was different
because I had ambition. I was as angry at the State as you are, once—not for the same reasons, but angry nonetheless. I had no desire to lie around a villa and screw an endless parade of
terrified housemaids, or sit in an office with a bunch of fat, lethargic princes, pretending to run an emirate. I saw what kind of security apparatus our vast resources were capable of creating and
I decided to unleash them. God knows no one else would have taken the trouble.”

“You’re a fucking tyrant,” said Alif.

“What other kind of man do the peasants respect in this part of the world? Come on, Alif. Tell me what you honestly envision for the City. A democracy? Plato’s Republic? You’ve
imbibed too much western propaganda. Give the citizens of our fair seaport a real vote and they will do one of three things: vote for their own tribe, vote for the Islamists, or vote for whoever
paid them the most money.” The Hand’s eyes twinkled. “Would you like to cast bets about the kind of treatment a person like you would get if the Islamists came to
power?”

“They’d probably make me caliph,” muttered Alif. “I designed their whole e-mail encryption setup from scratch.”

“They’d stone you to death for adultery. Don’t imagine for a moment that they’d bother with the nicety of four witnesses to prove your guilt.”

Alif felt his anger returning. “I’ve never committed adultery,” he said. “Intisar is my wife in the sight of God.” The words sounded profane as soon as he said
them. He did not love her. The promise he had made to Dina, the promise she had prompted from his guts and his loins and his heart by showing him her face, was greater than his furtive union with
another woman.

“Oh, you’ve signed a precious little piece of paper. I don’t suppose you bothered with witnesses either.”

Alif was forced to admit he had not.

“You see? You’re as much a hypocrite as your bearded friends. Your marriage isn’t valid in the eyes of God or anyone else. This is what kills me—why can’t we be
honest with ourselves? Why must we drag God into each of our sins? You wanted to go to bed with Intisar, so you did. Better to be an honest fornicator than a false pietist.”

A retort died on Alif’s tongue, killed by a grudging sense of relief.

“Am I supposed to admire your honesty?” he said finally. “Is that it?”

“I had hoped you would.” The Hand looked a little sad. “I imagined our first conversation playing out in a very different way. I thought you would divine the purpose of my
bringing you here more readily.”

Alif blinked away tears in the bright light.

“You’re here because I’ve won,” said the Hand. His mouth settled into an unfriendly line. “You asked what I want from you—I should think it would be obvious,
but since it isn’t, I’ll tell you. I’ve won. Even though you took my trump card and used it against me, I’ve won. I want that realization to settle over you like a
premonition of death. I want your defeat to seep into your bones as you sit naked in the dark, watching your life and your sanity spool away before you into nothingness. I want to watch each of
your intellectual powers drop away one by one until you are a quivering, pissing mess at my feet. By then I will have gotten what little information I require from you to rebuild my system. You
will become useless to me. At that point, I will allow you to die. Perhaps I will even have you executed, though most probably I will starve you to death instead. The idea of watching you eat your
own fingernails in desperation is appealing.”

Alif’s breathing became labored. He looked the Hand in the face, ignoring the tears that streamed from his smarting, dilated eyes. The fear was so intense that it was indistinguishable
from euphoria, and gave him strength.

“I will live to watch you thrown to the dogs,” he said quietly.

The Hand laughed.

“You wish.” He turned to leave, rapping on the door in the far wall of the room. It opened from outside with a loud clank.

“Next time,” he said over his shoulder, “we will talk more about the book.”

* * *

After that, they began to feed him. Every so often a slat would open in the door—no light accompanied it—and a tray was shoved through into Alif’s cell. He
did not believe that these meals, usually bread and lentils, came at regular intervals; sometimes he was still full when the next one arrived, yet at other times he was ravenously hungry for what
seemed like days before the slat opened again. He suspected the uncertainty was part of the Hand’s procedure, designed to keep him anxious, or to further elide his sense of time. Alif learned
to jump up at the sound of the slat opening; if he did not, the tray would clatter to the ground in an inedible mess. A paranoid certainty settled over him and he was convinced that each meal was
his last, inaugurating the Hand’s threat of starvation.

A beard grew on his face. He tried to guess the number of days of his confinement by the length of the hair, but it proved impossible; the only time he’d ever had more than a few
days’ worth of growth was when he had coded Hollywood. It simply grew, and at one point he woke to discover a full fist-length under his chin. Very soon after, the lights came on again and
revealed two State security agents, who dragged him down a corridor to another bare room to hose him down and scrub him with a wide brush meant for the floor. Alif had howled in pain, heedless of
his dignity; he howled again when they took a razor to his head and face, removing all hair from both and leaving him nicked and bleeding. For a time he fantasized that they had read his mind, and
did not touch his face to judge the length of the hair there.

He began to speak to himself in an attempt to stave off the lizardlike haze fast settling over his mind. It started, he thought, as a rational exercise, a method of self-preservation. He recited
song lyrics, as many as he could think of, jogging his sluggish and increasingly nonverbal memory for fragments of things he’d heard on the radio once he had run through several albums of
Abida Parveen and the Cure. He would stop when his voice was hoarse, satisfied by this quota of mental exercise. Soon enough, however, the tenor of these monologues changed, and he would wake from
a half-daze at the sound of his own babbling, halting in the middle of pronouncements that did not seem to contain words.

Panic returned then; slow, oozing panic that seemed to emanate from his pores in a foul-smelling sweat. He found himself calling for Vikram, in the insensible hope that the creature would appear
from between the cracks in the wall and free him amid a volley of insults. But Vikram did not come, and with a dread that originated in some uncorrupted part of his soul Alif knew Farukhuaz had
spoken the truth. He mourned, grateful to be shaken by a feeling that fed on something higher than animal adrenaline. Supplications for Vikram’s soul flew out of the darkness, and for the
woman he had taken with him. He did not say her name, worried that the Hand might be listening, but he projected the image of her naked face with all his might, until he believed he could see it
hanging in front of him, a truer darkness than the one that blotted out his sight.

Farukhuaz he could sense. She—or it, the primordial thingness of her, invented yet eternal—lurked at the edge of his perception like a cautious predator waiting for its prey to tire.
Of Farukhuaz he was most afraid, certain now of what she truly was, and when he could remember, while he could remember, he recited holy verses under his breath. He felt like a charlatan; he knew
it could see the indifference of his faith. As his verbal self declined, he felt it getting closer, a fetid presence that stalked his shrinking perimeter of sanity.

When the Hand appeared again, Alif was glad to see him.

“Thin and disgusting,” the Hand said approvingly while Alif wept in the bright light, unable to keep his eyes lubricated against its sudden luminous influx.

“Alive,” Alif croaked.

“Yes, for as long as it suits me. Look, I’ve brought you a chair.” He unfolded a metal object and placed it in front of Alif. Alif peered at it, and deciding it was what the
Hand claimed it to be, sat down. The laminated seat was cool against his cramped muscles.