Fire in the Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam Page B

forklifted metal receptacles to The Mirror ’s warehouse storehouse. Fuck: as if they could hide the lugubrious odour, the Director sighed, making rounds of the inventory and giving the day’s recording tapes a good inhale.
    Ever the skeptic, Abd’s surety only increased my father’s doubts of actual minds on the thoughtreels though the question nagged and lingered and led him to follow whims of a secret compass whose bearings only pointed nightmare. One day, Mamun Ben Jaloun wanted to turn back except he could not decide whether behind him extended the path he had followed or what way lay ahead. Around him rested broken compartments of shelves, sinews of magnetic tapes exposed to the environment, the memories of dead smells dead thoughts, flashes of light and crimson dark, as well as other evidence of shipwreck and ruin. But it was not like the old days when one could not expect to findanyone in the labyrinth, Archives employees were always collecting reels, so he yelled hello. The echo reverberated for centuries, redoubling every few seconds and coming back and back again as a louder cry than the one he had sent out, until he became confused as to whether what he heard was his own voice or another’s. When, long after, it grew silent again, he heard the stirring.
    He saw a man shake his head and rise from the ashes and filth, his legs bowed and his body covered profusely with hair. The stranger babbled for a long time, incomprehensible, before finally managing to spit out, Who are you very angry, it seemed, to have been disturbed.
    My father, discomfited by the other’s presence, explained himself and hoped to avoid a conflict. He explained with his hands outstretched, gesturing in the energetic way to which he had grown accustomed from spending so much time with Xasan Sierra and the smoking-shop crowd.
    I can pluck them for you, the stranger spoke clearly, saying he knew precisely where were the reels my father was searching for, if you allow me to ride on your shoulders, since, as you can see, he pointed to his bowed legs, I am not entirely ambulant.
    And before Mamun M could consider the strange offer, the man raced around behind him, leapt nimbly simian up his back, and seated himself on his shoulders.
    What in the, my father tried to unbalance the trespasser and stepped this way and that, but the greater his efforts the more the vagabond increased his weight and enwrapped his legs around Mamun’s neck and shoulders, while letting fly shrieks of perverse pleasure.
    The pressure was so great Mamun M felt colours throughout his body flowing from other corners of the universe and just when he thought the pain could get no worse the hairy man’s fists thumped against the sides of his head and he heard such loud shouts of joy that it returned him to a functional state and invoked in Mamun M the greatest desire to inflict physical pain on his assailant, a desire he hadnever before experienced. But all his attempts would be set against him as, exhausted by his efforts, my father dropped to the floor, which only allowed the vagabond’s feet to wrap around him even tighter.
    Mamun awoke to the hairy stranger’s shouts and his tugging on his ears, Get up, onward yaa. Some transformation seemed to have occurred, and as if under a spell, my father slowly rose and began galloping through the wilderness of that subterranean maze, turning and accelerating, whoa there, avoiding debris and volleying over obstacles strewn across their path until they arrived in a place where the ground shifted with every step and everything, including the weak light that drizzled onto them from above, was suffused with a dampness. By now, my father had grown somewhat accustomed to the stranger’s weight and the dampness penetrated through clothing through skin, and the air was sad because it reminded him of the times he and Shukriah would attract crustaceans of the Gulf of Eden with the humidity of their