More: A Novel (8 page)

Same as always.

Which is?

Like
khat
!

I beg your pardon?

Like I’ve been chewed up! Like I’m being chewed on. Like I might be chewed on any minute now, that’s how I feel.

Then there’s only one thing you have to do …

What’s that?

Have yourself spat out.

How?

Cause pain.

To who?

Whoever’s mouth you’re in, that’s who.

But he’s dead. Dordor and Harmin killed him.

The dead can’t chew, Gaza.

They damn well can.

Believe me, they can’t. Some other mouth is chewing you.

There is no other mouth.

There is … the shed.

The shed! Don’t be ridiculous! Whose mouth is that then?

You father’s … Ahad’s mouth.

Never thought of it that way.

It’s my job to think, Gaza. Not yours.

What’s my job, then?

To kill me.

That’s what you always say. Please, stop saying that.

Fine … but only because you said please.

Thank you. How do you feel now, then?

Same as always.

Which is?

Like a paper frog.

There were two alternatives to transporting illegal immigrants: in the first, the goods, that is, the person, would be delivered to the recipient and do forced labor in that country in order to pay off their transportation fees. In the other, the recipient
was
the goods and would, in return for a one-time-only payment, be taken where he was going and left to his own devices! Since the world was changing, however, the first model was becoming more commonplace. The equilibrium of income between regions of the globe was fast approaching the ratio of
life: no life
between the earth and the moon, so compared to one side of the illegal immigrant transportation business, the other became fleshier and fleshier with each passing day. Another reason for this was its potential for even more profitable side-trades. The utilization of illegal immigrants as illegal laborers in the manufacture of illegal goods meant an extraordinary advantage in sustainable economy and sustainable
evil
. For even evil required a certain amount of effort to sustain it. You couldn’t expect human nature to do everything! Anyway …

The costs of illegal manufacture were lower even than exportation costs out of China. Because of this, in fact, so much profit was expected of the exchanges to be made in the target country that transportation, and in some cases even accommodation, were basically free, and illegal transportation services, also symbolically priced, were in the ascent. From Kabul to Marseille or Islamabad to Napoli, the free worker shuttles took off, shuttling back and forth between continents. This meant even more broken-nosed profiles passing through our shed. Those harboring dreams of freedom in the country they were headed to were replaced by those who had acquiesced to being put to work for years so they could save just enough for a cow per year and send it to their families. Of these half were aware of all this as they embarked on the journey, while the other half, oblivious to what was to come, imagined themselves to be on their way to get a piece of the pie. Illegal immigrant transportation had become indistinguishable from slave trade. When one examined the eminent techniques of the industry, violence came forward like the sun. Still, as it was too difficult to uphold the old, exhausting, and time-consuming traditions of receiving slaves in return for won battles or setting up markets for human auctions, the contemporary world had channeled its energies into that miraculous device, willpower. Though establishments that used traditional methods of violence and provided capital for the sex industry did still endure, the most powerful means of human trafficking was persuasion. This was of course also a type of violence, but at least when all was said and done, it didn’t leave as much of a mess.

Ultimately, the general behavior of those who came in and out of the shed suggested, besides the fear brought on by ambiguity and illegality, a docility loaded with dreams of cows—the average weight of which, by the way, is five hundred kilos. This entailed the emergence of a new breed of immigrants with even more of a slump to their shoulders, heads even more bowed in compliance, and in a positive correlation of poverty/compressibility, took up even less space in the shed, who carried their own rations for fear of having to pay for food, no longer talked to one another as much, and lastly, constantly made sly little plans. As a result, they weren’t much distinguishable from the slaves in ancient Egypt. We’d collectively gone back in time! After seeing that new breed, in fact, I never once again believed that the pyramids had been built by extraterrestrials. It didn’t take me long to realize that the pyramids had been built not
by
humans, but
from
humans. Long story short, and thanks to the support of the macroeconomy policies of G-8 and G-20 member nations, I was now G-1 and pharaoh of that seventy-two-square-meter shed. The only difference between me and the child pharaoh Tutankhamen was that I didn’t wear stupid makeup. Or a skirt … As a pharaoh, all I needed was money. Enough money to help build my pyramid! I was at the age, no,
past
the age to be stealing from my father! But there was no possible way I could make alterations to the shed without his knowledge. Therefore, first of all, I needed to persuade Ahad. He was on the phone in the arbor. With Aruz, of course. I waited patiently for them to shut up. Two months had passed since I’d gotten the news of Harmin’s demise at the hand of the parasites on the back of the hippopotamus he’d gone out to hunt. June, which I’d hated, since much like insects, the immigrants increased in number in the summer, had come around again, but this time I wasn’t so upset that school was out. I had my heart set on supremacy after all.

Finally father hung up and, fixing his customary unseeing gaze on my face, asked: “What is it?”

“The shed,” I said.

“What about the shed?”

“I made a list. Take a look …”

He picked up the paper I placed in front of him and read only the first item before he asked:

“What is this?”

I had to stay calm. If he saw my eagerness, he would figure it all out. He always did. He figured out even the nonexistent. He was like a primitive animal with the ability to sense an impending earthquake. Right behind those dead blue eyes was a radar tuned to my inner world. My father was a weapon created for the sole purpose of ruining me. A technological wonder! An unmanned aircraft of sorts! Or whatever, just anything without a person inside. Yet still I was prepared! I myself had a few tricks up my sleeve …

“You know how you mentioned that there’ll be more people coming in this year and we should enlarge the reservoir? I think that instead we might install all this. Now, the real issue isn’t the numbers. Because some way or another, they can squeeze in. That’s not the problem. Plus until now the most we got was, what, a hundred people at the same time. And the reservoir handles that, easy. The actual problem is: when the numbers go up, it’s out of the question to do daily errands. Especially when there’s a baby or an old person or whatever, I can’t get anything else done. And you know how they sometimes get into fights with one another …”

I was doing perfectly well up until this point. In fact, just a few months ago, I had been two strides away when a Lebanese man attempted to suffocate another Lebanese man with a plastic bag over his head. It was later revealed that they had both come from Beirut. One was a Shiite and the other Sunni. Sunnis had blown up the marketplace in the neighborhood of the Shiite, while Shiites had blown up the mosque on the Sunni’s street. Two madmen at least as unfit to be near each other as an Ulster Volunteer Force militant and an IRA militant, and somehow they’d escaped notice and were put in the same group. Of course we’d only been able to find all this out through Aruz’s translation over the phone. It was decided after impromptu tele-trial that both were to have their hands tied until they reached their final destination. They were more than welcome to strangle each other once they got to wherever it was they were going. Besides, even if they didn’t, their children would keep on strangling one another. Sectarian wars were like fashion trends. They repeated themselves every twenty years. In the Middle East, at least.

Since people in the West had long known to dress for their shape, they only spilled blood for the sake of the acidic colors of things like fossil fuels. But since it was especially difficult to get bloodstains out of the carpets of the European Parliament and the White House, they didn’t let the fighting inside their homes. Still, they were also only human, and like all humans were itching to war with their peers. And so they whispered to each other, “Meet me outside after class!” and as soon as they set foot outside the Western civilization, saw no harm in grappling inside other people’s houses.

Though of course it was different with Israel who, believing itself to be the Greenwich of politics, wanted not only clocks but even the seasons to be tuned to its liking and expected everyone to wear the clothes suited to the ensuing climates. For Israel was a neurotic, black-robed desert ninja that emerged from its own mist and flung Stars of David this way and that.

And finally there was Turkey, a bulimic, depressed girl that saw herself as fat in her mirror to the East and emaciated in her mirror to the West. For two decades she ate without pausing for breath, got fat, and, stricken with guilt, made herself vomit for another two decades until her throat bled so she could start eating again.

I was aware that generalizations were a pathological inclination, but then a people generalized itself the day it founded its state. We were living in too organized a world to avoid generalizations. It was too late! We preferred to be bought and sold in bulk. If you liked a handful of the fabric, you had to buy the whole thing. Just like in the textile industry. Or, to be more accurate, the spiderweb industry … As it came to show, everything had to do with fabrics. From the blindfold of Justitia, goddess of justice, to the flag, everything was a matter of fabrics. The few native Amazonians who had managed to stay naked owed the tranquility in their expressions to their lack of fabrics. The lack of tranquility in mine as I spoke to my father, on the other hand, I owed to being cut from the same fabric as him …

“But if we had a camera … I could just put the monitor in the shed and keep track of things there. If something were to come up, I could go take care of it or, I don’t know, come tell you. Of course when you have the camera, you’d also need a light. Three fluorescent lights would be enough. See, I wrote down all the prices. Also I was thinking we can maybe put in a little partition. You know, instead of that curtain we make them put up. Plaster would do the trick. They get into a lot of fights over the toilet too. Some guy was staring at this one, staring at that one, that sort of stuff … I took the measurements and looked into the costs of that as well. Matter of fact I say we make a partition for the toilet, then this other partition. Say we put a ring on the wall of that one. You know how sometimes one of them freaks out, we stick him in there and chain him to the wall … We don’t need to hire anyone, either. I can take care of it all. And a fan. Because it stinks to high heaven in there. Which wouldn’t be a problem, but then someone passes out and you have to deal with that, it’s a waste of time! I think the less we have to do with the drugstore, the better. Look, here’s the cost for the fan. You can get floor fans. Three is enough. The trick is to avoid getting them sick … If I could just figure out a solution to the toilet issue too! I mean some sort of sewage link … but that’s too much work. No matter, we can keep doing that the old way … Now look, we’d need just about this much money to enlarge the reservoir. But see, all this adds up to just this. I say we don’t need to stick out our necks that much at all. It’d be enough to get these … What do you say?”

He wasn’t saying anything. Yes, I had prepared well for my presentation, but there was never any knowing what Ahad would do. He was even apt to say, “Is this what you’ve been wasting time on when you could’ve been studying!” and land one right in my face, even though he didn’t care a bit about my school situation. But for the moment, he was content to just stare at me. It was as if he were seeing my face for the first time in his life. Maybe he was. He was seeing me for the first time. He stared … stared … and spoke:

“Well done, kid!”

I expelled my breath in part from each nostril so he couldn’t tell how much I’d been holding in. And of course, my heart started beating again. And it was then that a miracle happened and he placed his hand on my shoulder.

“Are you sure you’ll be able to handle it all?”

“I will! Don’t you worry. When’s the next shipment coming in?”

“In two weeks.”

I was reduced to a gibbering fool by his easy assent to my proposal. And this was proof:

“In two weeks I’ll turn that reservoir into a paradise, I will!”

He laughed. I laughed too. That his fourteen-year-old son was so enthusiastic, or even passionate it could be said, about the family business, must have moved some cells somewhere inside him. Perhaps for the first time since I was born, he was proud of me. He didn’t say that, naturally, but it was exactly that kind of moment. I would be happy to be proud of myself even if he wasn’t. After all, Ahad had already begun peeling bills from the sheaf he’d brought out of his pocket. Then all of a sudden he stopped and asked: