Alif the Unseen (6 page)

Midway through October, a sandstorm blew in from the interior. All morning Alif lay in bed listening to a cacophony of female distress on the roof: the maid, Dina, and Dina’s
family’s maid rushed back and forth to bring in the laundry before it was stained by the rich mineral silt choking the air. He ground his teeth and heard microscopic grains of dust pop
between them. No matter how well one taped the windows, it inevitably seeped inside, propelled by some unknown and perverse force of nature. Soon he would get up and go over the inner recesses of
his computer tower with his mother’s hair dryer on a no-heat setting, a trick he’d learned from sandstorms past. He closed his eyes against the gray half-light. It could wait a few more
minutes.

A thud against his window pane made him jump. He scrambled out of bed: on the ledge outside sat the black-and-orange cat. She looked at him entreatingly, ears flattened, coated in yellowish
dust.

“Oh, lord.” Alif peeled his homemade perimeter of duct tape off the glass, opening the window a few inches. The cat squeezed through and flung herself into the room. She landed near
the foot of his bed, sneezing.

“Look at you, you’re filthy. I barely recognized you. You’re going to get sand everywhere.”

The cat sneezed again and shook herself.

“You’d better not make any noise or the maid will come after you with a broom. And don’t pee on anything.” Alif pulled off the
thobe
he’d worn to bed and
selected a black T-shirt from his wardrobe. After he was dressed he opened the door to retrieve the breakfast tray of flatbread, white cheese, and tea the maid had left for him. The tea was now
cold; Alif drank it in a single swallow. Squatting next to his computer tower, he pulled off the casing and examined the CPU. A thin film of dust covered the blades of the exhaust fan. He blew on
it experimentally.

“Not as bad as it could be,” he murmured. The cat rubbed her head against his leg. As he reinstalled the casing over the CPU, he heard an alarm chime from his speakers.

“Fuck.
Fuck
.” Alif darted to his desk chair and pounded on the space key until the computer monitor crackled to full resolution. His connection speed was dropping fast.
Hollywood’s encryption software was reporting a string of errors.

It was the Hand.

Alif felt sweat break out on his upper lip. He forced himself to concentrate: he had to protect the people who depended on him. One by one he severed Hollywood’s connection with his
clients’ computers—it would leave them exposed, but a few unprotected hours were better than certain discovery. His fingers seemed stiff and abominably slow. He cursed. Another alarm
went off as the first of Hollywood’s firewalls was breached.

“How, how,
how
?” Alif stared at the screen in awestricken panic. “How in all the names of God are you doing this?” Only four of his clients were still connected
to his OS. OpenFist99, sever connection? Yes. TheRealHamada, sever connection? Yes. The Hand moved deeper into his system.

“This is not possible,” he whispered.

Jai_Pakistan, sever connection? Yes. Alif looked at his client list: the only machine still accessible was Intisar’s. He was running out of time.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s not you they’re after.” He pulled the master plug out of the wall. With a whine, his computer went dark. Alif gazed at his
vague reflection in the black screen, breathing in uneven gasps. He heard sand blowing against the window. Little satisfied sounds came from the cat, who had discovered the cheese on his breakfast
tray. Time and the world slipped serenely forward as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. He shook his head to clear it. What had occurred? A series of timed electrical impulses, on-off
on-off. That was all, and it might mean a prison cell for the rest of his life.

Alif waited half an hour before turning his system on again. He ran three sets of diagnostics on Hollywood, whispering a prayer before each one: they returned no anomalies. Reconnecting his
clients, he debated whether to send an e-mail letting them know what had happened, and decided against it—what could they do but panic? He would find out how the Hand had managed to cut
through his defenses, he would go through the code line by line if he had to.

“I can fix this,” he murmured to the screen. A wave of nausea seized him. He leaned forward with a groan, pressing his forehead to the cool metal edge of his desk. Sand hissed around
the house, aspirated like some deranged human voice, some haunted voice. Alif heard Dina turn on music in her room—a cheerful
debke
dance song—as though she, too, found the
storm unsettling. He got out of his chair and curled up against the wall they shared. When his computer was on and connected to the grid, he never felt as though he was alone; there were millions
of people in rooms like his, reaching toward each other in the same ways he did. Now that feeling of intimacy seemed fraudulent. He lived in an invented space, easily violated. He lived in his own
mind.

The cat padded up to him and put one sympathetic paw on his knee.

* * *

That night he dreamed of a woman with black-and-orange hair. She slipped into bed beside him, unself-consciously naked, and comforted him in a language he had never heard. Her
eyes shone in the dark. Alif responded to her without embarrassment or surprise, seeking her mouth and the hollow of her throat while she purred. She ran one hand along his thigh with a look of
invitation. He was checked by a feeling of regret.

“Intisar—” he said. The woman made an irritated noise and nipped his shoulder. Urgency overwhelmed him. He covered her slender form with his, shifting his hips as she threaded
her legs around him. Delight stole over his body in waves. She cried out when his enthusiasm intensified. Bending to her ear, he whispered in the language she had spoken, telling her they had to be
quiet, quiet; obediently, she stifled her moans in his neck. The end came quickly. Alif collapsed against the warm body beneath him, and the woman laughed, speaking a word of triumph. She kissed
him with a fond smile. Alif begged her to tell him her name, but she was already receding into darkness, leaving behind a scent like warm fur.

Alif woke to the sound of the cat batting her paw against the window. He felt sated and calm. The storm winds were no longer audible, and the City beyond had descended into a deep, restorative
silence. He rose, wincing; his calf muscles were sore. When he opened the window the cat blinked at him once and leaped down into the courtyard. He leaned out and took a breath. The air was purer
now, stripped of pollution and heat by the sand. Dawn tempered the eastern horizon. He turned at the harsh sound of a metal hinge followed by feminine coughing: Dina pushed her own window outward,
waving one hand to clear the dust that had accumulated on it in the storm. She wore a long green scarf and held it coquettishly over her face with her free hand, like a palace maiden from an old
Egyptian film. The image charmed him.

He called her name in a soft voice. She turned to look at him, surprised.

“Oh! What are you doing awake?”

“I had a—” He blushed. “I just woke up, that’s all.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, but not really.” He took another long breath. “I wish it was always like this. The air and the light.”

“Me, too.” She followed his gaze out over the City. The skyscrapers of the New Quarter looked as though they had been built out of pearl and ash. In a few hours workmen would come to
clear the dust and return them to their glassy anonymity, but for now they looked like part of the desert, a natural extension of the great interior dunes.

“Like a story,” Dina said. “Like a djinn city.”

Alif chuckled. “Just like a djinn city,” he agreed.

They stood in silence for a moment.

“I’m going to pray
fajr
on the roof,” Dina said finally. “Be well.”

“God grant you paradise,” said Alif. Dina’s eyes crinkled in a smile. Her window swung shut. Alif lingered for a minute longer, gathering his thoughts. He would shower and have
some tea—there was no point in returning to bed with the day so limpid before him. Redoubling his defenses against the Hand would require all his skill; he might as well begin now, while he
felt confident and clear-headed. He would not think about the possibilities that lay before him: at any time a knock might come on the door and reveal a pair of State security policemen in khaki
uniforms. Or worse—they might not knock at all. They might appear in the middle of the night and drag him, bound and hooded, to one of the unnamed political prisons that lay beyond the
western edge of the City. Alif closed his eyes and banished the thought. He must not lose focus.

Once clean and caffeinated, he sat at his desk and opened one of his code editing programs. Somewhere there must be an explanation for the swiftness with which the Hand had entered his
system—a weak or outmoded function in his firewalls, a flaw in his overall design. He wondered uneasily whether the attack had been a coincidence—the result of a roving audit—or
targeted at himself. Was his name out in the open? There had been no warning, no chatter on the City’s mainframes about any captured gray hat cracking under torture and delivering up
identities or locations. His clients were all as safe as he could make them up until the very moment the Hand appeared. No, Alif could not have been the intended target.

“That almost makes it worse,” he said to his machine. If the attack was a coincidence, the Hand must be a magician to break through his defenses so effortlessly and with so little
information. It was obscene, unbelievable. Alif knew no one with this level of skill. His own ability was childlike by comparison. He leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “There is
always a way,” he said. “Know there is a way, and the way will present itself.” The words seemed naive as soon as he said them.

He worked steadily until midafternoon, reviewing and adjusting code with an attention to detail that was fanatical even by his own standards. He broke when the maid called him for lunch.
Trudging downstairs, he found his mother seated at the kitchen table, washing a bowl of red lentils for the evening meal. She hummed a Bollywood song as she massaged them, sending cloudy trails of
sediment up through the water.

“Hi, Mama.” He dropped a kiss on her head.

“There’s
saag paneer
on the stove,” she said. “The maid cooked it specially for you. You still like
saag paneer
?”

The question irked him. “Yes, I still like
saag paneer
.” He took a plate from the cupboard and helped himself.

“Your father is in Jeddah,” continued his mother. “He sent me a photo on the computer. He is getting tan, out in the sun all day supervising the new natural gas pipeline. A
shame to get so dark. I told him to put sunscreen.”

“Good. Great.”

“You should call him.”

Alif snorted. “Why shouldn’t he call me?”

“You know how busy he is. Better for you to call.”

Alif bent to take a bite of
saag paneer
and studied his mother over the edge of his plate. She pushed the lentils back and forth, her face expressionless aside from a little crease of
concentration on her forehead. Alif wondered whether the photo—a perfunctory snapshot of an absent husband; he could see it in his mind—depressed her. There were other photos, prints
she kept in a sandalwood box in her room, that she had shown him when he was small. In these she and his father were always together, walking along the Old Quarter wall or buying flowers from one
of the stalls in the souk. She looked radiant: an adored, illicit second wife.

Alif wondered at what point the thrill of the marriage had dimmed for his father. He suspected it was his birth. A problematic son with dark-skinned pagan blood in his lineage, the product of a
union unsanctioned by his grandparents, impossible to wedge into good society. A daughter would have been preferable. If she was pretty and well-mannered, a daughter could marry up; a son could
not. A son needed his own prospects.

Alif heard his phone buzz upstairs.

“I’ve got to get that,” he said, pushing his plate away. “Please tell the maid the
saag
was delicious.”

He jogged to his room and picked up the phone: Abdullah’s number was flashing on the screen. He held it to his ear.

“Yes?”

“Alif-
jan
. I can’t talk. Can you come over?”

Alif felt his heart rate spike. “What’s wrong?”

“I just said I can’t talk,” said Abdullah impatiently. “
Yallah,
waiting for you.” He hung up. Alif shoved the phone in his pocket, cursing. He ransacked
his cluttered room for a pair of shoes, pulled them on, and went out into the street.

* * *

Abdullah was pacing back and forth across the interior of Radio Sheikh when Alif arrived. A young Arab man with bleached hair was with him.

“Alif, thank God.” Abdullah crossed the room in two bounding steps and shook his hand. Alif curled his lip.

“A handshake? What are we, third cousins? What’s going on?”

“Never mind the handshake. I’m nervous, that’s all. Alif, this is Faris. Faris, tell him what you’ve just told me.”

The Arab man looked around restlessly. “Are you sure he’s all right?” he asked.

“All right? All right? My dear
sahib,
Alif has been with us since the beginning. It is vital that he be told.”

Alif and Faris regarded one another, frowning.

“Fine,” said Faris, “here is the story. I work in the Ministry of Information.”

“One of my moles,” Abdullah explained.

“It’s low-level work—mostly I collate documents and answer the telephone. But on Tuesday I sat in on a meeting—”

“With the assistant minister himself,” Abdullah said gleefully.

“—and I heard something strange. There were two men from State security at this meeting. They talked about a carnivore program they use for their digital counterterrorism operations,
and how successful it has been. They asked the minister to congratulate the man who designed it, and to thank him for spending so much of his own personal time administrating it.”