Djinn City, page 34
He walked toward his gate finally. There were ley lines of power clustered around the house, physically pulling at him, but he hit a barricade long before that, plainclothes ex–police officers fingering shotguns, bored. They turned him away with a push and a shove, one of them recoiling in disgust after getting a good look at his face. Indelbed wanted to say that it was his house, that he belonged there, that he wanted to go home, but there was no one to talk to, no one the least bit interested. With a terrible pang, he longed for the old days, when it was just the Doctor, Butloo, and himself, their peculiar three-pronged family that had just about lurched along, oblivious to djinns, magic, and dragons.
He looked in vain for someone he knew and remembered Mr. Karim, who lived in the neighboring apartment building and had sent them a fruit basket every Eid. He tried the gate, but a guard blocked his way, and when he mentioned Mr. Karim of flat 4B, the man laughed and said that Karim Sahib was not in the business of talking to diseased beggars. When he didn’t move off the step quick enough, the guard whacked him with a stick halfheartedly. Loathe to give up, he found a shady spot by the electric pole and sat on his haunches, waiting for at least a familiar face. People passing by avoided him, but otherwise left him unmolested.
After several hours sitting still, he had his patch of the road sewn up, his power spread painstakingly thin, until he could track every mongrel rat that strayed into his path.
At last he saw Ali, his old friend from two houses down, grown tall now, walking with a backpack but still with that telltale shuffle, surrounded by a gaggle of other boys. Ali Baba would remember him—they had spent hours playing marbles, poring over a solitary dirty magazine; he had often thought of Ali in the cave. He called out Ali’s old nickname as he passed, softly enough, and Ali’s head jerked around in recognition, but his eyes dulled as they crossed Indelbed’s huddled form, like a curtain falling, and he walked on without slowing, not seeing anything that might possibly interest him.
Indelbed almost despaired. Was it Ali? Might his sight be off? He wanted to run after him, to ask him about marbles and magazines, but the moment had passed.
Then he saw an old man walking toward the corner store, slightly stooped, wizened, but not really that much worse off for a decade’s worth of living. It was a man absently walking the same steps he had done for the past forty years. Butloo! Indelbed squinted hard, tracing every familiar plane on that face, every wrinkle, until he was absolutely sure.
Then he called out in joy, he stood and waved his arms, forgetting everything. Butloo turned and stared at him, perplexed. “It’s me! It’s me!” But the old man saw something fearful, for he made a warding sign and backed away, brow furrowed, a look of horror on his face. Indelbed croaked out again, voice breaking, but there was only confusion in Butloo’s face, and it occurred to Indelbed that perhaps he didn’t look like himself, not like little Indelbed, not like anything human at all. He wanted to speak, but no words were coming out, only a lot of blubbering tears. It was too late anyway. Butloo was hurriedly walking back, and the shopkeeper, irate at this disturbance, was already coming out from behind his counter with fists clenched.
Indelbed retreated, gathering his tattered blanket around him, casting his face back into the shadows, adopting the shuffling gait of a beggar. Givaras had promised him dragonhood. Instead he had made him into a misshapen outcast.
He wandered aimlessly for a while, walking off the despair in his gut, until he came to a railroad market—hawkers with baskets of tired vegetables, ripe-looking fish eyeing the tracks with longing, their ghost souls contemplating annihilation, and clothes piled on racks—a sort of impromptu shopping center that scattered every time the train came and then amalgamated again on the tracks. It was dark now, and even these inveterate traders were winding down, heading for nearby shanties, or just finding a good spot on the ground. Indelbed was tired, hungry, and desolate, his distortion field guttering out so that he could barely see two feet in front of him, and he had no money for food or water, so he found a quiet space and lay down inside the cocoon of his rotten blanket, trusting in the dark.
He woke up in the weak light of predawn, found himself propped upright and tied to a pole naked somewhere behind a tin shed in another section of the tracks. His hands and feet were loosely bound with cables, enough give that he had slid to his knees. A younger boy sat on a stool nearby, watching, a thin strip of bamboo in his hands.
“Water,” Indelbed said. He raised his face and gave his captor a ghastly smile.
The boy took a plastic Coke bottle full of tube well water and poured it over his face, keeping a fair distance. Most of it dribbled into his mouth.
“Bless you,” Indelbed said. “Where am I?”
“They brought you at night.” The boy nodded toward the shed. “The night guard from the market and Ramiz.”
“Why?”
“They were going to rape you, but when they looked at you with a flashlight they thought you were diseased, and no one wanted to have a go.” The boy picked up a brick. “Listen, do you want me to hit you on the head?”
“What?”
“Trust me, it’ll be better. The guard is not so bad, but Ramiz likes hurting people. He’ll beat you for hours and then set you on fire. That’s what he said last night. He did a retard beggar like you last month. The guard filmed it and showed it to me.”
“I’m not a retard.”
“You’re a freak. No one’s gonna come looking for you.”
“They let you live.”
The boy shrugged. “I’m not diseased. Have it your way. You’ll be begging for the brick soon.”
“Won’t the market people come when I scream?”
“Scream?” The boy laughed. “No one came when I screamed. They’re protecting the market, see, catching thieves. Everyone knows little boys are thieves.”
“They’re going to burn me…”
“With kerosene.”
“Stick around then,” Indelbed said, and grinned. “You’re going to enjoy this.”
When the men came out finally they found him napping. The night guard was in his uniform, replete with stick and whistle. From the stains it seemed to be his only set of clothes. He came and cracked his truncheon against Indelbed’s shin, hard.
“Look at this thief, Ramiz,” he said. “Sleeping like a baby.”
Ramiz was a chubby, bearded man with a checkered scarf around his head and a spiffy Arab-looking outfit. He had a three-foot length of rod in his hands, which, up close, Indelbed identified as a product of the BSRM steel company. A second later it slammed into his arm, hard enough to fracture human bone.
“Look at his eyes,” the night guard said. He had his phone out, filming, an avid, obscene gaze on his face. “He’s blind.”
“He’s still a thief,” Ramiz said. “You know what I do to thieves.”
“Yes, Ramiz,” the guard said.
“We’re going to break your arms and legs, boy, and then I’m going to cut your hands off.”
“And then we’ll burn you,” the guard said. “Don’t forget the burning.”
“He already looks burned,” Ramiz said. “Disgusting. He ought to be killed before he spreads his filthy disease.”
“Don’t touch him, Ramiz,” the guard tittered. “It might be catching.”
“Don’t worry,” Ramiz said, “the only rod I’m going to use on him is iron.”
They laughed a bit at that, and then Ramiz started cracking Indelbed’s arms and legs with a well-practiced swing. The blows got harder progressively, but Indelbed was dragon inside, and his bones wouldn’t break. He cried from the pain, though, screaming with each terrible hit, and that seemed to please Ramiz well enough. The guard watched from the sidelines and shouted instructions. Ramiz started bashing Indelbed’s knees, stomping on his hands and feet, working methodically for an interminable amount of time, until he was faint from the pain and his voice reduced to a whisper.
Inside he was laughing, because this was nothing compared to the madness Givaras had inflicted. It seemed as if his master had trained him well for life on earth.
“Fire!” he shouted, letting the laughter bubble out. “Bring the fucking fire, enough of this tickling.”
Ramiz didn’t like that. He set to with rage, aiming for the head, trying to blot out the unexpected intrusion.
“He’s going to pass out!” The guard pulled him back. “He’s not going to enjoy the kerosene!”
“Fuck this.” Ramiz tossed the rod aside. “This freak actually wants to die. Get the kerosene, boy.”
The boy brought a jerrican and splashed it all over Indelbed, shaking the last few drops directly on his face.
“Wish you’d taken the brick now?” he whispered.
Ramiz lit a book of matches and threw it into the puddle, fanning the fire with a piece of cardboard until it caught properly. The three of them stood back to watch. The flames shot up with the kerosene, covering Indelbed almost completely, igniting the scales beneath his skin. It was nothing like core fire. He was dragon, and kerosene fire was like a mother’s embrace, a hot breeze on a summer’s day; it energized him, taking away the pain and the exhaustion. It burned off his bindings, freeing his arms and legs. He surged up, arms spread wide, fire dancing on his skin, and he embraced Ramiz, holding him tight in a lovers’ grip, and kissed his face until the fire caught his clothes, his hair, his mouth, until his eyes shriveled and his ears crisped, and he fell in a wet mess, thrashing in animal pain, trying to slough off his own skin.
The night guard tried to run, but the boy tripped him, ramming that bamboo stick into his legs. Indelbed set fire to his ankles, holding on for a good minute, until he could feel the bones turn to charcoal. He left the moaning guard for the boy. They seemed to belong together. He felt the urge to leave this filthy place, but everything was distant, subservient to the roaring exuberance of the dragon. Indelbed whistled as he walked along the tracks to the market, carefree as a bird, arms alight, setting fire to everything he touched.
CHAPTER 42
Of Apes and Men
Roger was socially awkward. He was a big, pear-shaped man with sparse hair and a scraggly, miserable-looking beard. He had made an effort, putting on his best clothes, but this amounted to a slightly crumpled white shirt and beige pants, the ubiquitous semiformal attire of his fraternity days, which he subconsciously reverted to whenever he was unsure. Nor was the venue conducive to his comfort—it was too fashionable, the food too fusiony, the waiters too good-looking, the drinks tinged with exotic fruits, the whole thing just off. Rais, never having set eyes on Roger before, had misjudged the entire evening. The most unhelpful part, however, was the glowering Maria, sitting opposite poor Roger and making him thoroughly anxious, for she was bored and, as often followed, entertaining herself by being cruel.
Roger was not good with females, and one of Maria’s caliber made him very jittery, so that he spent half his time flicking his eyes toward her before quickly returning his gaze to the misery on his plate. Roger, it turned out, was also not good at reading the menu, for he had mistakenly ordered an assorted seafood platter, hoping for some combination of shrimp and scallops, and had been served instead a sea urchin and octopus gumbo.
What Roger was good at, however—pretty much the only thing really—was thinking. Specifically, he was a near-genius geneticist with far-reaching theories on human evolution, work that he pursued in his free time, while fulfilling his near-menial day job at a middling lab in Vegas that catered mainly to vanity family tree haplogroup testing. This was a fad now, so middle-aged men and women giddy with excitement could go off to Ireland to finally find Great-Uncle Harry.
“Look, Roger, just order something else. They’ve got burgers here, I’m sure…” Rais said, trying to make up for Maria’s utter, unconcerned rudeness.
“It’s okay, I like this, er, octopus soup thing.”
“We should have just gone to a bar,” Rais said. “We’ll do that, yeah?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Of course you don’t,” Rais said. “Do you want some ice cream, perhaps?”
“For fuck’s sake he’s not four years old,” Maria said.
Roger, whose face had lit up, now stared back at the table morosely.
“Look, we’ll just have a bunch of dessert.” Rais signaled the waiter. “Can’t go wrong with that…”
“Our house special, sir, is bacon ice cream with a pumpkin mousse…”
“No, no, we want something normal. Like cake. You have any cake?”
“Cake? Cake?” The waiter stroked his beard in contempt. “Sir, we have a Thai-Austrian fusion of mango sticky rice with Sachertorte, if you wish to be conservative, haha—”
He stopped talking because Maria had grabbed his tie and yanked his head down, literally, to her level.
“Listen, dickhead, my friend wants cake. The food here is garbage, as you well know, so please, for the love of god, get us something fit to eat so we can end this miserable night.”
“Miss, we don’t… we don’t have real food.”
“I’ll give you fifty bucks if you go to the bakery down the street and get us something.”
“Yes, madam.” The waiter straightened up. “Of course.”
“That—that was great!” Roger said, speaking coherently finally, his admiration overcoming his natural reticence.
“Thanks,” Maria said, thawing slightly. “I’m the muscle.” She was always a sucker for genuine flattery.
“Roger, man, thanks for helping us out,” Rais said.
“Sure, man, anything for the Jew—”
“Er, Rog, we try not to call him that anymore,” Rais said, as conversation in neighboring tables diminished noticeably. “You know, it being racist and all.”
“Right, right. Well, the J-E-W throws a lot of work at me, so when I got your skin cells I did the karyotype right away. G-banding, right? It condenses and stains the chromosomes so they can be studied under a microscope. Standard stuff. Anyway, the results were so weird that I repeated them a bunch of times, using different techniques, and now I’ve been working on them the whole week. Like voom! I can’t think of anything else.”
“Well, that’s great, Roger.”
“You gotta tell me, man, what the hell are they?”
“I will, I promise, but why don’t you give me your theories first?”
Roger, talking about work, was a different man now, far more animated and articulate enough that even Maria was interested.
“Sample B and sample K, right? Well, right off the bat, we got something majorly weird. B has twenty-four chromosomes. Humans have twenty-three, right, in diploid pairs, so B has gotta be a great ape. I have a look at it, and sure enough, chromosome two is split in two, just like a great ape would have it, except the sizes are a bit different, and then I scan it for some common gorilla or chimp or bonobo markers, and nothing there—I mean, there are major differences in genes, they’re further away from the great apes than we are, despite the twenty-four. So it’s an unknown branch of great ape, am I right? I mean, that’s mind-boggling, because there just aren’t any unknown offshoots we know about.”
“Okay, back up a bit to the chromosome two thing.”
“So humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, and all the other apes have twenty-four chromosome pairs. This was a major problem for evolution, because we’re supposed to be related to a common ancestor, so how the hell did we lose a whole chromosome pair and still be functional, right? And we know we lost a pair, because what are the chances of gorillas, chimps, and bonobos all gaining an extra pair by chance? Well, the obvious answer turned out to be the correct one. We didn’t lose any genetic material at all—turns out somewhere along the human branch, two of the chromosomes just fused together. There’s evidence of this on chromosome two, which clearly has the centromere and telomeres and genetic information of two smaller ape chromosomes. It just all fits together perfectly. So that’s kind of the big circumstantial evidence for evolution of man from ape, but of course, the weird Bible guys froth at the mouth thinking about it. Anyway, this thing still has the twenty-four, which means it split from the common ancestor before the humans. Our closest relatives, the Denisovans, had twenty-three pairs, and most likely Neanderthals did too, so sample B has to be an ape offshoot.”
“He certainly looks like one,” Maria said.
Roger gave her a puzzled glance. “However, that’s not even the most remarkable thing. The really strange thing is that this thing isn’t diploid. See most mammals are diploid, meaning the chromosomes come in pairs, one from each parent. This sample is tetraploid. That’s four chromosomes per set. This happens in plants and some rare animals, like frogs or salmon or reptiles. It almost never happens in mammals. The only case I can think of is the viscacha rat, in Argentina. There are most definitely no unknown species of great ape with viable tetraploidy. Therefore, I believe this is a joke sample, although I have no idea how it could have been made. I must conclude that this is a birthday present from the Jew, because my birthday is coming up. It is the day after tomorrow.”
“It is not a hoax.”
“It’s a living sample? You’re sure?”
“I swabbed B’s mouth last week while it was passed out in its own vomit,” Rais said.
“Okay, okay, I explored that possibility.” Roger was visibly excited now. “Look, it could be a massive, massive mutation. It’s possible that when this thing was being conceived, the two gametes doubled for some reason, creating a true tetraploid, and then that carried on through mitosis. This is possible. It happens in humans sometimes, but the fetus normally miscarries, or if it’s born, it doesn’t survive long. Gross congenital defects. Sample B is an unknown ape with gross congenital defects.”
“It is not an ape. I will tell you what it is later.”
