The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (4 page)

In a city where one could find—for example—dogs, graffiti, and palm trees, it would be possible to fall in love.

Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with Aad, with Iram—who had lofty pillars, the likes of whom had never been created in the lands? And with Thamud, who carved out the rocks in the valley? And with Pharaoh, owner of the stakes? All of whom oppressed within the lands, and increased therein the corruption. So your Lord poured upon them a scourge of punishment.

—Qur'an 89:6–13

The Wikipedia article on Iram warns: This article
needs attention from an expert in Archaeology.
The specific problem is:
the article is a confusing mix of myth, supposition, popular sources and very little science, scholarship or sense; the result is a meaningless overview of the subject, accompanied by random facts and inexplicable leaps of logic.

According to the article, Iram is also known as
the City of the tent poles.
It is
a lost city
or perhaps
a tribe.

The passage from the Qur'an quoted here appears in the article. A note at the end reads:
translated by error.

I walk to the restaurant with my uncle. There's nothing, no atmosphere. It's like anywhere. Iram, the windless city, is buried underground. I wish there were more of a glow so that I could see my uncle's suit. Once, I remember, I told a friend I was disgusted by the idea of a Daddy-Daughter Dance. So heterosexist, I said. I mean—ugh! My friend said she had gone to a dance like that with her father when she was a little girl. Magic, she said. If there were a glow I could take my uncle's arm. She felt so special. It was the happiest night of her life.

Translated by error.

In Iram, my uncle understands me perfectly. I realize we've been speaking in Somali. We sing the song about the Prophet Isa's birth, the one about the darkest night. The very darkest night.

It almost doesn't matter that I'm carrying these awkward plastic bags.

In the window of the restaurant, there's a small blue light. My father waits for us inside. It's the way I told you before. Happy, happy. I'm the only woman there.

There are hardly any women in Iram. This is a problem, because without women nothing happens. Nothing goes on without them. You will have realized at once that there's a connection between these missing women and the missing domestic objects. In Iram, there are windows but no curtains. I'm not saying women have to create these objects; I'm saying they do. Sometimes, after dark, I catch sight of a woman just disappearing around a corner. I recognize her from her photograph.

According to the ninth edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Iram is a lost city
which yet, after the annihilation of its tenants, remains entire, so Arabs say, invisible to ordinary eyes, but occasionally, and at rare intervals, revealed to some heaven-favoured traveller.

I write on a scrap of paper:
Q-tips. Deodorant. Small hand lotion.

I have a terrible longing to visit Iram again. I'm full of plans. I want to take a beaded wooden spoon with me next time—I think it's somewhere in my parents' house. The Somali pillow, too, and the little stool we used to call the African Stool. I'm sure that, when I reach Iram, I will know its true name. Perhaps that sounds romantic, but I believe things have true names. I believe everything has a name that I don't know.

In the restaurant, my father and uncle laugh together. My father grips my uncle's shoulder, chuckling naturally and with pleasure. It's not the explosive, uncontrollable laugh that seized him in our house the night some Somali guests came for dinner. My father had invited them. Everything was going well, and then something happened—I believe my brother made a face at one of his kids—and my father started laughing and couldn't stop. I remember we all laughed, too; we kept telling each other how terribly funny it was. Our guests smiled politely. You have to understand that at this time it was very rare for my father to eat with us, even rarer for him to invite guests to the house. The production of a normal family required immense effort. We were all keyed up to the highest pitch of excitement. My father's laughter seemed to go on forever, past bearing. At one point I felt pinned inside it. I couldn't move. Later I would experience that kind of laughter myself, when I was working in South Sudan during the war.

When you're outside, you can picture exactly what you want it to be like, but once you get in, all you can do is follow along.

You can help me. You can tell me if these feelings are universal. What is normal? I've felt for a long time that
normal
is something suspect, that embedded in the idea of the normal is something dangerous, an erasure of everything
abnormal,
a death or a series of deaths. But isn't it actually normal to want to be normal? I would like to build an entire philosophy out of Iram, the absent city. This philosophy would serve all the children of immigrants, many of the immigrants, and many others who found themselves at a loss. Eventually people would come to say:
This philosophy is available to all. Anybody can go to Iram.
All sorts of people, many of whom looked nothing at all like me, would disembark in the unconstructed streets. They'd bring their own bags, their photographs, their desire. Early in the morning, you'd find teenagers putting up playbills on the walls. Their sense of satisfaction would be so strong, it would color the air. For the first time, Iram would have a color of its own. But of course that can't happen until we import more objects, until we have succeeded in creating the conditions for nostalgia. For this reason, I fear that my feelings are not universal. Surely love cannot exist outside of time. It depends upon small objects.

The fact is, when my uncle died, he and my father were barely on speaking terms. My mother told me that my father disliked my uncle's gifts, specifically the gifts my uncle gave to my mother and me: gold jewelry, dresses heavy with beads. My mother, who is often sad, and not without reason, was sad because of this split between my uncle and my father. She and I wore our glittering beaded dresses to a New Year's Eve party. Everyone said we looked beautiful, exotic.

My father didn't go to the party. My father went somewhere else. I don't know where. Perhaps he was helping to draft the Somali constitution. When he disappears, I always imagine him doing heroic work. Once someone asked if I thought he worked for the CIA. I said I don't know.

We never eat anything after the appetizers. We're drinking tea from my uncle's thermos. My father and I use cups and my uncle uses the lid. In the radiance of the cobalt flame in the center of the table, of my uncle's marigold suit, I am dreaming of things to bring to Iram. I wish I could bring a bathroom door from the library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but how would I take it off, how could I get it out of the building? I'm picturing myself in the snow and ice, sliding down State Street with the big gray door clasped somehow under my arm. Impossible. And anyway, I don't know if that object would work. I don't think it's sacred in the way that a piece of cloth worn by a relative is sacred. Something that holds perfume. The door of a public bathroom stall—it's so anonymous, it doesn't even hold the imprint of my shoe. The imprint of my shoe where I kicked the metal door in a rage. A Somali student had told me his name was Waria. I knew it wasn't a name. He was making fun of me. It couldn't be a name, because it was just a sort of word. It was just something you said, not you but my father, on the phone. A sort of preface, like
Hey
or maybe
Hey, you.
I realized I didn't know what it meant. Something melted in my face. Excuse me, I said. I went to the bathroom.

I question this idea of the
heaven-favoured traveller.
What kind of favor is it to arrive at an empty city? A city that goes on, lifeless,
after the annihilation of its tenants?
I'm just standing here on the corner with my bags.

To have no one to blame but yourself is to have no one. It's the worst fate.

a lost city
or perhaps
a tribe

I want to fall down in Iram. I've never tripped or fallen there. It's the sort of thing you can't organize; it has to come up and catch you unawares. I want to be caught and thrown to the ground in Iram, to scrape my knee. Look, there's blood. That's me. If that happened, I feel certain a new kind of light would arrive. I'd look down at my blood on the pavement, and my blood would show me the edge of a flight of steps. That's really what it's called. A flight.

If it gets too painful, you can stop.

When my uncle died, he left six children. Two sets of triplets. Three boys and three girls. I don't know them, because my father is on bad terms with my uncle's widow—in fact, he is estranged from her whole family. My uncle and his wife had their children through IVF treatment. When I was a child myself—long before my uncle's children were born—I remember being told that my uncle was unable to have children, because of what had been done to him in Somalia, in prison.

You can stop.

The woman is smiling in the photograph. I'm on her lap. I'm three or four years old. I asked my mother who she was, but my mother didn't know; she couldn't remember; she said, You'll have to ask your dad. I was getting ready to move somewhere—perhaps Cairo, perhaps Wisconsin. My father had not been home for several days. I put the photograph away with the others. I was afraid to ask, afraid to find out that this lovely woman, my relative, was dead. Now I consider this an act of cowardice. I remember the picture. The smile. It seems to me that one corner of the photograph is cut off. Was someone else there? This woman is happy; she loves me. She smiles so fully, with such golden warmth, as she disappears around the corner in Iram. Next time, I think, I'll rush to catch her, I'll shout, perhaps I'll fall down in the empty street. But of course there's no
next time,
only
not yet.
At one point I thought I was writing this to force myself to ask my father about the photograph. But I must have lost it, because it's gone. I can't ask now.

i wish i was a little swallow

that i had wings and i could fly

My uncle was shot and killed in his bed. Addis Ababa, 2010.

I'm just standing here on the corner, holding my plastic bags.

Very little science, scholarship or sense.

I'm just trying to hold them both. Let's all laugh together. Sweet blue light. Let's pour a little more tea. Let's order more appetizers. Dad, let's stay here; let's not go. I remember when I was a kid, on long car trips, I'd imagine a giant saw was attached to my side of the car. The saw could cut through anything. It sliced fences; it sliced trees. The fences gave a swift groan and exposed the hollow insides of their poles. The trees went
snick
and fell over with juicy ease, the tops of the stumps left gleaming moist and pale, like a wound before the blood comes. I was leveling the whole country from my seat in the back of the car. I don't know why it gave me so much pleasure. The world was coming down to size. I know it sounds like the opposite of what I'm trying to do in Iram, but the feeling is the same.

The chapter of the Qur'an that mentions the city of Iram is called
al-Fajr.
Dawn.

Because we are familiar with gold and we are familiar with mountains. Because we are familiar with pillows and spoons. Because we are familiar, we can imagine. Is that true? Look, here I am, at my desk on the highest roof of the city. I sit up here at night so that you can find me if you come. I am listening to my father's cassettes. You will have noticed that there is sound in Iram, and this is why I come back, I think, to these blank and shrouded streets. I am trying to imagine sound as an object. As soon as I press
play
the light comes on, that white ceramic glare, and cigarette ashes lift away from the tape recorder and disappear in the air of Iram, where it is always night. Light pins me to my seat. When my father was in the basement listening to poetry, we knew we mustn't disturb him. The door was edged with grainy fluorescent light, the stairs coated with black rubber. It was a terrible, terrible place. And poetry came up as it comes to me now. I know the words for
pearl
and
water.
I am singing of the moon, of a great-limbed tree. Amber necklaces come to me and thorns and rain and a fiery horse and a lonely dhow adrift on a trackless sea. In Iram, I know the names. I sit repeating them, enraptured, frozen in an ecstasy of bad light. No continuity without desire. Look for me if you come. You'll know me by the falling of my arm.

KELLY LINK

FROM
Strange Horizons

I
F THERE'S ONE
thing Anat knows, it's this. She loves Oscar her brother, and her brother Oscar loves her. Hasn't Oscar raised Anat, practically from childhood? Picked Anat up when she's fallen? Prepared her meals and lovingly tended to her scrapes and taught her how to navigate their little world? Given her skimmer ships, each faster and more responsive than the one before; the most lovely incendiary devices; a refurbished mob of Handmaids, with their sharp fingers, probing snouts, their furred bellies, their sleek and whiplike limbs?