Djinn City, page 6
Going to his room, he began to pack, but of course he had no idea what he should be taking. The bat and ball seemed childish somehow. He worried about food. Should he load up on bread and butter, perhaps? Clothes? He added his toothbrush, toothpaste, and soap. The bag had a little compartment that fit these things.
He pulled out his sleeping suit, which was a Disney hand-me-down from some distant cousin. He added his small face towel and some underwear and socks. His favorite pants and the best of his T-shirts followed, along with the new stuff the Ambassador had bought him. Already the bag was full. He slid the Hulk comics on top and then sat on the bed, next to the bag. A wave of self-pity brought a lump to his throat, and he almost started crying.
Luckily, Rais entered just then. He sat next to Indelbed and wordlessly went through the bag.
“You might want a coat,” he said.
Indelbed, who had no coat—who needed a coat in Dhaka?—shrugged it off. Rais, who was riffling through the closet, seemed to realize his mistake.
“Or a blanket maybe,” he said. “Or this sweater?”
The sweater was less bulky than the long quilt he used as a blanket. He compressed it into the bag and pulled the zipper.
“I think I’m ready,” he said.
“Take this.” Rais pulled out his Nokia cell phone and a black charger. He pushed them into Indelbed’s hands. “Look, I’ve entered my number under Rais and my mother’s number under Juny. She said you should send us a text every day. Just to keep in contact. And you can call either of us if you need anything, even in the middle of the night. She’ll come get you.”
“She said that?” Indelbed looked dubious. Aunty Juny had previously shown a positive aversion to receiving calls from him.
“Look, I’m not sure I like sending you away with someone we don’t know,” Rais said. “And mother doesn’t like it either. It’s important you send a text every night. Give us a progress report. Don’t worry about the phone bill, I’ll be paying it.”
“Okay,” Indelbed said.
“Do you want to say good-bye to your father?”
“No,” Indelbed said. “I already saw him, when I was getting the bag.”
Rais gave him a long hug and helped him down. There was nothing much else to do. The Ambassador patted his shoulder and gave him a five-hundred-taka note. He added some vague instructions. Aunty Juny just glared at all of them and said nothing. She seemed angry, at whom he could not decipher.
Butloo had managed to find a yellow cab, which was parked on the main road. He carried Indelbed’s luggage up to the car and seemed a bit teary-eyed. Indelbed had never particularly thought about the man, but he considered that it might be said that Butloo had, for all intents and purposes, pretty much raised him until now. Certainly he had been a more reliable figure than Kaikobad. On impulse, he shook Butloo by the hand and pressed the five-hundred-taka note into his palm. Butloo gave him a deep salaam and a sad smile.
The driver honked once. Siyer was getting impatient. Away from the others, he had dropped some of the theatrics in his manner. His movements were brusque now, his face cold and tired. Indelbed got into the backseat beside him, and they drove off.
The apartment in Mirpur was next to the zoo. Indelbed had never been to the zoo, so he craned his head around to see if he could catch a glimpse of anything interesting. Siyer was sleeping, his face scrunched up against the dirty side window. He looked considerably less impressive now. The taxi battled its way to the pavement, stopping abruptly. An irate rikshawala was tipped to the ground. Indelbed woke up Siyer, got out of the cab with his luggage, and waited on the pavement. For a moment the Afghan glared at him, and then he grudgingly paid off the driver.
The apartment building was an old redbrick affair with grilled balconies hung with washing. Some of the windows had air conditioners hanging out, staining the walls with the discharged water. The man at the gate looked at them suspiciously, but Siyer’s grandiose manner had returned somewhat, and after some key waving and broken Bangla, they were allowed in. There was a dirty, decrepit lift, the floor blackened with the grime of countless sandals and bits of rotten food.
GU Sikkim’s apartment was shabby and small, with two cramped bedrooms, a kitchen, a drawing room, and a dining room all set along a central corridor. Indelbed could see down the length of the entire apartment from the front door. It had a musty, unpleasant odor. Siyer stood at the door, the very picture of disgruntlement. He seemed unwilling to go in. He was clearly used to finer things. Indelbed looked back and saw the Afghan’s expression change suddenly from disdain to fear.
A heavy fist grabbed Indelbed by the neck, literally swinging him around. He looked into the face of a bald, glitter-skinned man, squat and powerful, somehow toad-like. His mouth glinted with something unpleasant. In his gut, with the absolute certainty of a child, Indelbed knew that this was, at last, the promised djinn.
“Come in, emissary,” the djinn said. “I’m sure you recognize me.”
“Matteras…” Siyer closed the door mechanically. He seemed to be in shock.
“You will appreciate that this situation is quite serious,” Matteras said. “I am willing to make accommodations with you, emissary.”
Siyer said nothing. The grip tightened inexorably around Indelbed’s neck, making his blood pound in his ears. Up close, he noted with horror the needlelike rows of teeth crowding the djinn’s mouth. The hot gust of his breath smelled of kerosene and something burned. For a terrifying moment he thought the djinn was going to bite him. It seemed inconceivable that he would survive this. His lingering hope that Siyer would do something useful was dashed when the emissary meekly put his bags down and stood still.
“You, boy, are coming with me,” Matteras said.
Those demon fingers tightened even more; Indelbed squawked in pain and then mercifully passed out of all consciousness.
CHAPTER 8
Kaikobad
Kaikobad woke up in the dark. It wasn’t really waking up, more of a gradual erosion of unconsciousness, a brick-by-brick accumulation of thoughts until a tenuous gathering of self was achieved. It wasn’t terribly different from waking up from a bender. His first instinct was to reach for the bottle, a habit ingrained for ten years or more, an immediate hair of the dog to stave off the crushing hangover. He then realized that he had no bottle and no hand, that he was, in fact, disembodied entirely. His second realization was that he was sober, all the way—crystal-clarity sobriety, like a TV signal suddenly becoming good—not confused or hungover or buzzed, but actually god-awful sober, and bodiless, he did not even feel the craving, felt nothing physical, just a cold certainty that he was sharp, his mind whirring at speeds unknown any time the past ten years.
This brought its own problems, of course. He had cause to drink. There was nothing wrong with his memory of the hospital bed in the crappy clinic—the only place safe for a djinn birth—and the gynecologist, an ignorant fool, a homeopathic quack but easily bullied. He himself had brought his wife there, racked with pain, and watched her bleed out in front of his eyes, his frantic calls for help unheeded. And who could help? Who knew at all that djinn were vulnerable during birthing, that half-breeds could kill coming out, that the nascent field of the newborn negated the mother’s, making her temporarily mortal, an Achilles’ heel that no one had written about.
The grief and regret crashed on him in waves, as raw now as it was then, and he craved the obliteration of alcohol, almost wept for it. She had warned him, had tried to steer him away from the normal human urge to replicate. Djinn lived for centuries; they had no overarching drive for offspring, for their immortality was stitched into their own sinew. He had wanted a son, a daughter, something to remember their union by, for his years would be short and hers indescribably long, and over the course of her djinn life stretching into infinity, he would have become a road bump, a brief dalliance, one mortal husband among many, half forgotten over centuries of ennui. Perhaps subconsciously he had struck against that immortality, had secretly wanted to bring her low for a time, make her step fully into the messiness of human life, the business of bleeding and pushing and bone-crushing pain. Ironically he had succeeded far too well, had stamped out her djinness, left an indelible mark on her life by ending it abruptly. Death by Indelbed. Had she guessed, perhaps, his secret desire, but acquiesced anyway? Djinn were maudlin like that, prone to gestures of deep sentimentality.
He had not been prepared. Not to be alone, not to raise a child.
“Indelbed!” The cry came out involuntarily, but he had no voice, so it just reverberated in his own head.
His more immediate memory ended with a phone call from his cousin, some farrago about schooling, and then a blank. He had gone to sleep and woken up strange. Had he passed out? Where was Indelbed? He couldn’t see. There was nothing to see actually. How did one tell the difference? Being blind and inhabiting a place with absolutely no light amounted to the same thing. So he moved, untethered as he was to the physical world.
Whatever had happened to him had fixed his brain. Concern for Indelbed now overrode his grief. He had marked Indelbed. He had woven spells around the house, had begged and borrowed favors from powerful djinn for protection. Yet something had happened to him. Disembodiment was not normal. He was not delirious. This was something else. He had not left the house—that last memory confirmed it. He remembered cradling the phone to his chest, one hand curled around his glass. Had something broken in? If so, then Indelbed was alone and vulnerable, the house no longer ironclad. Was it Matteras, come to exact vengeance for a myriad transgressions? It must have been. Who else could break wards like water?
Hesitantly, he drew on the field, trying properly for the first time in ten years, and the power came cleanly, without the hint of madness, like a cold drink of water. Whoever had broken him had unwittingly given him a fair exchange. More than fair, for he had traded his husk of a body and his alcohol addiction for perfect clarity of mind and an abrupt return to his full magical potency. The field twitched around him, responding to his will, hinting at malleability. Disembodied, he could move fast, although there were no markers, just a sense of the field shifting, like he was floating in dark waves, in a vast, directionless black ocean. Movement was just a flicker of the imagination, an instinct.
Still, there were flavors here, and far away he felt a hardened point, a point of distortion, something else here, perhaps something similar to him. If he was in the field he was not dead. He did not worry about his body, did not worry whether he was dead, or severed, or in some in-between form. Djinn orthodoxy claimed paradise for all djinn, the superior race, a special heaven just for them, and it was left at that. Others had speculated that the field itself might store information, perhaps even the souls of the dead; might be a layer of reality laid atop the physical world, entwined in it, and physical law was like an onion. He had once been interested in these things, before love and death and alcohol had proved much more powerful than the dry lure of intellect.
And now, a deep-rooted longing, an almost physical need to hold his son, came over him. It was Indelbed he looked for, desperately, trying to conjure up the essence of him, counting the ways he could have survived whatever had attacked the house. There was nothing but that faraway node, so he made for it, and the arrival was almost instantaneous, or time was piled up on top of itself; either way, he found himself in front of a structure. It was a giant door. This was not a physical thing. In this place, there was no matter as such, only energy. Still, he could discern this was a gate. The sheer size of the distortion was what had drawn him. It was a choke point, like fine muslin drawn through a ring.
It was locked, but not against him. He went in of course—what else could he do?
It was a paper shredder. The thing elongated his mind, or whatever information matrix he consisted of, in the field, and then crushed him to a singular point, and then let him pass, rendering him safe and jumbled up, a ball of alphabet soup. It took a long time to reconstitute. But on this side there was no progression of time; time was compressed on top of itself without thought to causation and all things happened in disorder, so it turned out that, in the end, he had all the time in the world.
When he regained consciousness for the second time, he was still in the field, but beyond the gate. This place had structures, other information matrices he could discern. It was like trying to read a machine language. There was an internal logic to it, clearly, but he did not have a Rosetta stone, nothing to start code breaking, not even a single point of reference. He floated toward them, through them, touching structures that could not be altered.
Inert. They perhaps represented nonliving things. They did not respond to him in any way. Size was misleading here. He had inflated himself to his maximum ability, but could not gauge yet the relative dimensions of anything, what these things were, how big they stretched. Perhaps he was like a fly, not yet worthy of swatting.
He went back to the gate and compressed himself, looking small, trying a different tack, and the darkness shifted to a more focused, detailed surface of the field, behind which loomed the gigantic bulk of the ring gate. He enjoyed, for a moment, a sense of wonder at this place, the ease with which the field responded. It was like flying after a lifetime of trudging through sand. I should have given up my body a long time ago, he thought.
He found a small monument by the gate. It seemed statuesque, upright, in his mind, like the sphinx, or one of the big statues at Luxor. It was not dead or, rather, was not completely inert. He speared his thoughts toward it, hoping there was a method of communication here as easy as telepathy.
“Hello,” he said. “I am the emissary Kaikobad. Kaikobad. Magician of Bengal. What are you? Who are you? Are you alive? Am I alive?”
There was a pause, and the creature regarded him. It was most definitely alive.
“I am Thoth. Of Gangaridai. I am the Captain of the Road.”
“Thank god,” Kaikobad said. “What road? Do you mean that ring gate?”
“I don’t know,” Thoth said. “I don’t know if that is the road. The road I was meant to guard was the Bone Road, the Charnel Road. I have not moved, but the road has moved away. I cannot find it.”
“Something happened to me too,” Kaikobad said. “I lost my body. I woke up here after a drink. I think this is the field. Are you djinn? Or man? Or something else?”
“I am djinn,” Thoth said. “Djinn of Gangaridai. I guard the road. You say you lost your body?”
“I was attacked, I think,” Kaikobad said. “Destroyed by my enemy. Or partially destroyed, anyway. I don’t think this is where the dead come, for we appear to be alone here.”
“Perhaps I too was attacked. I have forgotten many things. I think I am damaged. No one has come this way for a long time. Or a short time. I cannot tell, because time is nonlinear here. Do you think I was attacked, and the road taken from me, much like your body?”
“It could be, friend,” Kaikobad said. “I am looking for my son. Or I’m actually hoping that he is still alive, still in the real world, and I can help him somehow.”
“I am looking for my road,” Thoth said.
“Yes, but my problem is more immediate,” Kaikobad said. “My son might be attacked and killed any second. Can you help me? I will then help you find the road, if I am able.”
“And if you find it, you must help me guard it,” Thoth said, with a degree of cunning. “Our enemies might come up the road, and we will stop them.”
“Fine, I agree,” Kaikobad said. What road, you insane creature?
“That is a good bargain, friend Kaikobad,” Thoth said. “If your son is in danger, I will certainly help you. It is the right thing to do.”
“The question is how. What manner of place is this?”
“I do not know all the laws of this place,” Thoth said. “It reflects the real world. It is perhaps a parallel in the field of the physical world. The gate is the key—the gate that you entered. What was on the other side? I have never been able to cross over. Is the real world on the other side? It is so close.”
“No, friend,” Kaikobad said sadly. “Outside was worse. There were no structures, no boundaries, nothing. It was like a black sea, featureless. To swim there is to drown.”
“I thought perhaps this was the afterlife,” Thoth said. “Although there is no one else here, no one else conscious at least. Or perhaps this place is so vast that we—”
“What about the gate?” Kaikobad interrupted. “You said there was a key?”
“If you step inside the well of the gate, you get visions,” Thoth said. “Memory shards of the world, or futures, or alternate possibilities, I cannot judge. If we search, we may find your son.”
“So we are going to look at random memories? Whose memories?”
“The memories come in streams, like rivers of connected events, and we must latch on when we spot something familiar.”
“How long is this going to take?” Kaikobad asked, aghast. “We might be literally looking through the memories of every djinn who ever lived.”
“What does it matter, how long?” Thoth said. “We have nothing but time. If you look long enough, you will find your son—if you are strong enough, if you can stay inside long enough. Are you ready?”
“I guess.”
“Be prepared. It is a deluge.”
CHAPTER 9
Underground Parties
