“Just… just my uncle Mohammed… he’s down… stairs… ”
“We spoke with him. He’s a very honorable man. But there are so many questions.”
Qasim choked back a belch of vomit. He sweated cold sweat, his good hand clenched in a fist and his bad hand throbbing. The man stared, watching and measuring. Qasim said nothing. With a great internal wrenching, he decided to answer only direct questions and speak as little as possible. He couldn’t lie, that was beyond his strength, but he could keep himself from giving away anything more than what they forced from him.
“Your uncle is very honorable,” the man said. “He takes care of his family. He takes care of you.”
Qasim coughed.
“It would be a pity if something happened to him.”
Qasim looked from the one man to the other.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” the one asked.
“I… think so.”
“What I’m saying is that we’re interested in certain kinds of information. But we’re very busy men, you know. We have only so much time. So if we’re looking over here, maybe we don’t have time to look over there. Or vice versa. You see?”
Qasim looked at the man, confused.
The man sighed and stood up. He stepped over to the desk, leaned over Qasim, and flipped through his papers. Qasim felt him at his shoulder, a menacing blur in his peripheral vision.
“What is this?”
“My dissertation, sir.”
“What’s it about?”
“Harmonic analysis. It… it has to do with permutations of Fourier series. Fourier transforms.”
“Transforms?”
“It’s…” Qasim gritted his teeth. “It’s very abstract. It has to do with series of numbers, with periodic functions. You would need several years of higher mathematics in order for my explanation to make any sense.”
“Why don’t you try?”
“It has to do with—simply put, what I’m trying to do is develop a harmonic analysis of certain non-abelian groups to explore whether or not we can analyze them topologically. I think I’ve been able to establish these groups as locally compact in certain cases, but I’m still working on applications of the Peter-Weyl theorem. The problem is, they’re not always locally compact—which means… well. It’s… it’s a bit ambitious.”
“I see. And these equations, they’re good for making codes?”
“What?”
“Somebody gives you a message and you turn it into a non-abelian theorem…”
“Oh, no. No. Not at all. That’s a totally different branch of mathematics. No. Cryptography, cryptanalysis, that’s totally different. You might talk to Professor Farani, she’s very good with that sort of thing. Not really my field.”
“No?” The man smirked.
“Oh no. Like I said, I’m working on harmonic analysis. I’d like, once I finish the dissertation, to see if I could push it further, topologically, you know, but that’s a completely different… that’s… wait.” Qasim’s realization shot fear through his belly: “You think I write codes.”
The small man slapped Qasim with the back of his hand. “Don’t pretend we’re stupid, Professor.”
Qasim held his head in his hands. His temples ached and rang.
“How about we just take this, all these non-abelian codes, and have somebody crack them?”
“What? No, please. No. It’s not…”
“No?”
“That’s… That’s my work.”
“Why don’t you tell us what we want to know? Or maybe you’d like to tell us in Abu Ghraib?”
“I… my uncle…”
“Yes?”
“I do accounting for my uncle. I’ll tell you who he bribes, how much, I can tell you the black market…”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “We’re not here to talk about your uncle, shit-dribble. Who else do you do accounting for?”
“I don’t… I don’t know what you mean.”
The man slapped him again. Then again. Then he picked Qasim’s glasses up off the floor and handed them back to him. He went to the door and spoke briefly with the other man, who came over to Qasim. He reached out and took Qasim’s good hand and pressed it flat on the desk. He held down Qasim’s wrist and pulled a claw hammer from under his jacket.
“We don’t want you, shit-dribble,” the one man said. “We want the men you work for.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Qasim said, his voice breaking. “I really don’t.” His mind scrambled for something, anything he could tell them.
“Last chance, shit-dribble.”
“My uncle…”
The one man waved his hand in exasperation. The other lifted the hammer.
“Wait!”
“Yes?”
“My uncle…”
The one shook his head and the other swung the hammer down on Qasim’s little finger, smashing the first knuckle with a bloody crunch. Qasim blacked out. He came to a few moments later, dizzy and tingling, sweat pouring from his forehead.
“Let me help you remember,” the one said. “We’d like information on the codes you write for Munir Muhanned.”
“Munir…”
“Oh. Now you remember.”
“I don’t…”
“Again.”
“No wait! Wait! I’ll tell you!”
“Yes?”
“Hamadaya,” Qasim said. The man looked at him quizzically. Qasim went on: “Anouf Hamadaya, one of the students in my class. She asked me if I would write codes for her brother.”
“And?”
“I didn’t. I’m not… I wouldn’t ever get involved with guys like that. I’m… I’m a coward… you see… her brother, Anouf’s brother, they say he works for Munir Muhanned. That’s who the codes were for. But I was too scared to do it. That’s all. That’s all.”
The man went around the desk and picked up Qasim’s dissertation.
“I told you, that’s all I know. There’s nothing…”
The other raised his hammer again and Qasim went silent. His hands throbbed. His face throbbed.
“We’re going now,” the one said. The other let go of Qasim, who pulled his bleeding hand into his lap. “But if you hear anything, anything that might help, you talk to your uncle. He knows who to contact.” The man turned and left, flinging the dissertation across the room as he went. His partner followed.
Qasim watched them go, desolate and sick with pain, then curled into a ball on his bed. He didn’t respond when Mohammed and Nazahah came to check on him, or when Nazahah splinted and bandaged his crushed finger. Only when they started to pick up his dissertation did he stir, waving them away.
The white empress hovered in the corner, her robes heaving in slow waves, her hands stretching across the space between them in the heat, head cocked, tears flowing down her cheeks and splashing her chest with tiny red blossoms.
Qasim sat up, tugging at the sweat-damp sheets, fumbling in the tangle. As he leaned toward her, she leapt at him, her face a dog’s face. Qasim fell back and she cried, “Why?”
Then she was gone. He sat alone, trembling. His bitten hand, aching, stank. His heart’s pounding echoed against the walls and he thought, How long? Has it begun? He imagined great whirlwinds of fire spiraling over the city. Fragments of a dream came back, running through alleys, a great coal steed at his heels, fire in its eyes, fire in its mouth. Its massive hooves pounded the air with sparks. The white empress watched from a high window, her mask impassive. Turning and turning, the streets a cyclone, all the world one ancient, winding alley. Again the dogs and something else, Anouf, a shard, her hands on his manhood, her mouth on his neck, while the horse pounded behind him. From above, the white empress watched—beneath her mask, tears.
He heard someone walk past his room. Dawn shone in a red line. Black palms rose like minarets and the minarets rose like rockets: the sky floated black under a starry blue sea, and that’s how they’d come at him, like sharks. Had it begun yet? Were the lights in the sky the sea, or the city?