When he leafed to the title page he noticed it was signed, the blue ink smudged across the page. He said, ‘You?’
The man nodded without looking up, named a price. Joe looked at the first page.
People fall down like leaves in autumn
The sky is a haze of smoke, burning red.
I see you, on the far shore of sleep
In a place I cannot follow you to
And can never now reach.
He put the book down. There were some cheaply-printed, staple-bound booklets on the table, mimeographed runny blue on dirty white. He picked one up. A sense of futility flooded him. There would be no answers here.
The Osama Gazette, Volume One, Issue 3. A man with a magnifying glass on the cover, through the glass, a miniature city, engulfed in smoke. He looked at the table of contents. Oil and ideology in the Osamaverse. Fictional Wars #2:Afghanistan. Terrorist, Freedom Fighter or Soldier? Osama Bin Laden as a Liminal Figure. He didn’t even know what that meant. The Twentieth Hijacker Hypothesis.
Put it down. Yet another publication. Osamaverse Stories. On the cover a man with a portable grenade launcher hiding behind rocks, high in the mountains, a helicopter flying overhead. The Fifth Plane, by Theodore Moon. Love in the Desert, by Vivian Johnson. A Cause Worth Dying For, by L.L. Norton.
‘You’re going to buy, or you’re just going to read them here?’
Joe put down the slim book. ‘Just browsing,’ he said, and wiped his hand, surreptitiously, against his side. He turned to leave. There were no answers there. He opened the door and stepped into the corridor outside, and as he walked down it he could no longer ignore them, could no longer pretend they were not there.
The answers were there, had always been there, only waiting for him to finally face them.
The refugees lined the silent corridor. There were men there, and women, and children, and they were the colours of shadows and dusk. They stared at him and their lips moved, though no sound escaped. He felt his heart shudder like an ill bird, straining against the bars of his body. He walked down the corridor and they parted before him, like leaves in the fall. They were many. Too many. He turned his head, left, right, and they looked back at him with empty faces.
Only one was familiar. He stopped, stared. Black suit, black tie, grey hair – ‘Oh, shit.’ He turned to run, but there was nowhere left to run. A hand on his shoulder – solid, real. ‘Joe.’
He turned. The man with grey hair looked at him, head tilted to one side. ‘I told you not to open that door…’ he said. He said it softly. He seemed sad. Then he made a minute motion with his head and Joe started to turn, could hear them behind him, knew it was too late even as he –
‘Don’t knock him out,’ the man with grey hair said. Something dark and velvety fell over Joe’s head, blocking out the light, muffling sound. He was grabbed from behind, his legs kicked out from under him. He fell, was caught. Was lifted.
He heard someone saying, ‘What’s going on?’ the man with grey hair replying, ‘CPD.’ Then he was carried, lowered carefully into a small, enclosed space. Something closed shut above him. He thought – the trunk of a car. He heard an engine start off, the vibrations thrumming through the hold. Then the car was moving; it took him with it.
dark Arabica
——
The darkness tasted like dark Arabica. There was a faint whirring sound far away, like a coffee grinder switched on, turning small roasted beans into a soft dark powder like a cloud-wrapped night. There was peace in that darkness. He was tied to a chair. He had been on that chair for some time. His hands and feet were tied to the chair. There was a sack over his head. It was very hot inside the sack. There were small holes cut into the cloth to let in air. The air tasted unused. The rope, where his hands were tied, cut into his skin. He needed, badly, to pee. His bladder was like a nuclear reactor threatening to go off, unstable isotopes excitable, protective shields decaying. But somehow he felt distanced from his body. Somehow none of the reports sluggishly returning to his brain – the pain in the wrists, loss of feeling in left leg, bladder pressure, lungs rattling like an empty can – none of these affected him. There was drool in the corners of his mouth. When he giggled it came out as a tiny warbling sound through the spit, the sound of a drowning bird trying to sing through water. There was a cold numb feeling in his neck where there had been a short, sharp pain earlier.
Sometimes the prisoner tried to sing to himself. The songs had no discernible lyrics nor, if only the prisoner had given it thought, any tunes. They could more accurately have been described as a humming, a low, long, constant thrum that could have come from hidden pipes behind the walls, from rows of moving cars somewhere beyond the walls, from the electric charge of storm clouds rubbing against each other in the place where sky-scrapers met the sky.
Sometimes the darkness that bound him seemed to expand outwards, into an infinite bubble of space, became a silent prehistoric sea through which he swam, as light as loose leaves, though there was never any shore in sight. Sometimes it constricted about him, and those were the bad times, when the darkness shrunk into a tight, hard ball, like the compacted load of a dung beetle, and he was trapped inside it, unable to breathe, his body defined in sharp lines of bright-light pain, in landing strips marking the drunken flight paths of the fat dung beetles. And sometimes it was as if the darkness was a vast abyss, and he was standing on a precipice of black granite above it, looking down, and a word came and floated up at him from that impenetrable vastness, like the name of a world beyond the world, a reality beyond reality, accessible to him only if he jumped. The word was Nangilima; which seemed a nonsense sound to him, like Heaven. It was a made-up word, or perhaps a name heard once and then forgotten, the memory hiding like a dormouse in the recesses of his mind until now, hinting at a world beyond; if only he could fly.
He couldn’t jump. Unseen wires held him suspended above the abyss, and though he pulled at them and thrashed and raged they wouldn’t break. Then there were more and more periods of grey, patches of nothingness eating at his world, growing bigger, lasting longer, times in which he was nowhere and was nothing, but even those went away eventually and the world shrank and there was pain again, a little at first but steadily growing, the world shrinking around him and over his face. It smelled of dark Arabica.
clear and present danger
——
Light hurt his eyes. The room seemed to move around him, wouldn’t stand still. He tried to fix his eyes on one spot but as soon as he did the room rotated away in an anti-clockwise direction. His hands felt very light. They were rising up of their own accord. ‘Give him a moment,’ the man with the grey hair said. Joe tried to focus on him but the man was spinning away with the room. Maybe they were in one of those rotating restaurants, Joe thought. Only there were no windows here, and no tables, and no diners, and the walls were stained in fantastical shapes the colour of rust. There was a pair of shoes beside him, polished, meeting dark pressed trousers. He leaned towards them.
‘Son of a –’ He heard someone shout, felt something hard connect with the back of his head. Pain again, but all he could do was open his mouth wider, the blood pounding in his head like a jungle beat, as he spewed out a thin jet of foul water onto the floor. He heard the grey haired man’s chuckle, saw one black shoe walking away, leaving footprints of sick behind it. ‘You’ll feel better in a minute,’ the man with the grey hair said. Joe rather doubted it. He dry-retched; there was nothing left to spew.
‘There’s a basin to your right,’ the man said. Joe turned his head, blinked sweat away. His eyes slowly focused. There was a concrete toilet hole and a concrete sink and both were decorated with the same rusty stains. He pushed himself up; staggered; ignored the man’s ‘Take it easy, now’; and dragged himself to the sink. The water tasted cool. Its touch on his face hurt, but only for a moment. There was no mirror. He was not unhappy about the fact. The pressure on his bladder returned, multiplied. Suddenly it seemed the most important thing in the world. His hands shook as he –