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Hector put on a pair of blue jeans with an untucked gray short-sleeve on top and light black Vans to match, and at eight thirty-five he tiptoed out of his apartment and climbed down the stairs.
The Pulauis had given him and Yubi Unit 301, right beside the stairs. The boys’ dormitory was well-conditioned. So when Hector exited to the garden, the poisonous air jolted him, made him pull his mask up over his nose. The haze had gotten much worse over the evening.
The haze was a perennial curse to Southeast Asian communities. Every summer, huge clouds of smoke traveled the Malay Archipelago, conquered the happy cities. People suffocated on the souls of dead trees, Gaia’s retribution in full swing.
Conspiracy theories and blame-dodging abounded in Asia, but the bottom line was there was no smoke without fire and that the fire was in Indonesia. There were people there whose livelihoods depended on the slashing and burning. They cleared their land of vegetation, then sold it—for peanuts, really—to corporations expanding their pulpwood and palm oil plantations in Southeast Asia.
More trees to burn for more money to print. What a bargain!
Yet even those made rich by this bargain (there was no denying it, the Pulauis were members of this club) were not happy.
“The scourge of every summer” was how Fred Zhang had described the haze at the airport, yesterday.
And another diplomat—who gave his full name as the ludicrous “Sylvester Fan”—pouted. “We’re as unlucky as you are, professor. We didn’t expect any of this before June.” Sylvester raised his arm to the dusty clouds concealing the skies outside the terminal’s glass dome. “It’s like hell has descended on earth. Atrocious, really. Worse than all the previous years. Even with Sumatra on hold.”
Yubi inquired, “Why Sumatra—”
But a squat, bespectacled man called Paul jumped in. “Anyway, you’re all set. The bus will take you to the National University’s residence in Prinsep Street. The driver is at your beck and call throughout your week in Pulau.”
“But unfortunately, you’ll have to buy your own masks,” Fred added, folding his wrists on the flat derriere of his buff suit. “The malls in Orchard Road are excellent. Also, check Ion Orchard and the Mandarin Gallery. Both are close to the res.”
Paul touched a hand to his right cheek in embarrassment. “It was really short notice for us.”
“We’ll see you at lunch tomorrow,” a smiling John chimed in. “Ambassador Lee is looking forward to seeing you all. And, please, professor, do not give up on Mermaid City yet. She has a lot to offer.”
Fred, Sylvester, Paul, and John. The four horsemen of the Middle East Directorate. White teeth, broad smiles, Chinese, polite, and inscrutable. Their ministry was up the mountain.
* * *
They called Pulau Mermaid City for two reasons.
Actually, it was a reason built upon another reason.
In ancient Sumatra, there was this folktale wherein the island of Pulau had sprung into existence from the body of a mermaid. That story was hardly known outside the Malay Archipelago. In fact, most Pulauis hadn’t heard about it before the late eighties, when their affluence called for a national history to be written.
By which time, however, the Malays—the historical inhabitants of Pulau—had shrunk into a minority in their own land, outnumbered first by Chinese settlers, then by the passels of Indian migrant workers coming during the New Deal economic boom of the 1970s and ’80s. Cosmopolitanism was never considered an option by Pulau’s leadership, so the Pulauis settled for a formal merger. Myths were jumbled to create a revised version of the island’s creation myth. The Malayan/Sumatran meat of the tale was kept. But it was married to Chinese folklore, not without a Hindu blessing.
The Mermaid was now the goddess of Pulau, its protectress and emblem. They painted her on their flag and erected a gargantuan temple for her: a famous lighthouse on the south coast. Travel guides promised fertility and eternal youth for those who kissed at the goddess’s feet.
You can imagine how romantic the idea had seemed, then, spending a week on this tropical, magical island of love and fertility. And everybody on the trip had braced themselves for a good deal of surprises.
But not this. Not the haze. The haze was no surprise: It was a catastrophe.
* * *
As Hector threaded his way in the haze-suffused garden, he recalled his first step on the airstair. How horrific. All those memories of teargas, the blood and skirmishes in Tahrir Square, had come back to him.
And he’d been able to hear and feel his students’ frustration.
“What was I drinking when I signed up before Googling the weather!” said Baxter.
“They didn’t buy us masks on purpose,” said Fifi. “They’re mean as hell, I can smell it. Arrrgh.”
“Congratulations, guys,” said Kero. “We survived a revolution to die on a remote island in the middle of nowhere.”
“It makes for a perfect absurdist story,” said Ahmed slyly.
“Maybe a nightmare, not a story,” corrected Zainab.
“Hey, Yubi, quick question,” Fifi said. “Did your husband bring us here to die?
After the MED men had left them, they had to rely on their luck to locate the bus. The airport parking was drowned in the smog, the lines of cars looking like infinite V’s. And there seemed to be no boundary between parking and street. So many times, they wandered off onto a sidewalk teeming with masked strollers.
They’d lost all hope, when they finally came upon it. It was a white Toyota minibus, parked under a pedestrian bridge with a placard tucked under its wipers, reading in all-caps:
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PROFESSOR K. FROM AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN AFRICA
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They found the driver dozing inside. Hector pounded on the glass door, and the figure inside started then jerked the door open.
He was a sixtyish Chinese man wearing Coke-bottle glasses behind which a pair of pinpoint eyes cut them down to size. He was uniformed in black slacks topped by a white tunic that had the bus company’s logo stitched to its left breast in Chinese letters. The man banged his fist over this very logo and spurted something about letting the bus company know.
“Let the company know about what, sir?” Hector asked.
“Always tell the company!” The driver threatened with his forefinger. “I think you went back to Africa, so I sleep. The haze make people go back. You America people do not respect.”
The students slipped into verbal combat with him, but the driver was too fast, too sour, too old to be gained upon. To resolve the situation, Hector asked his male students to help:
“Mr...?”
“Li,” the driver allowed.
“Please, guys, help Mr Li with the bags. If you need a hand, let me know.”
Fifi seated herself beside him on the bus. Hector looked at the rearview mirror to follow the outcome of his diplomacy. He saw the driver arguing with the boys over the size and heft of every single bag they wished to jam into the narrow trunk. Yubi and Zainab were giggling in the backseat.
“This is weird, doc,” Fifi said.
“Uh-huh?”
“This trip, it’s weird.”
Fifi—Fatima Noman—was the dean’s niece. Like all the Nomans, she was a celebrity. Fifi’s father was the world-famous Ibrahim Noman, the man whose name had become synonymous with the Egyptian Revolution. When Fifi had signed up for this trip, the Big No—as Mr Noman was known throughout the Middle East—had objected to her going, fearing for her safety. But Fifi had insisted, hooked on Hector’s intricate myths about Pulau and Asia. So the Big No had relented: He’d called Hector in person and asked him to bring Fatima home safe. And Hector had promised him he would.
Now, despite being the dean’s niece, Fifi effaced herself. She barely spoke at all in class: only moved her gazelle’s eyes among her classmates and nodded at whatever they said. Hector believed she was struggling to make friends. No wonder there. Fifi’s second passport—Austrian—bestowed upon her the benefits of a European citizen, a gift millions of her fellow Egyptians would kill for. But that made Fifi also a stranger among them.
She wasn’t pretty. Her skull was too big and her skin hirsute and rough. Her cheeks were stamped by butterfly freckles that made her smiley always, even when she cried (which happened a lot and resolved without explanation). Her brown hair was wavy and dry and very, very lush. Her father had married a Gypsy woman toward the end of his stint in Vienna as secretary-general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Exile had been rather elective than compulsory for the international lawyer, and he thought he’d finally found love, a benevolent recompense for a life half-wasted trying to fix corrupt Arab regimes, half-gone arguing with stiff-necked European academics bored to death by the lack of a new great war to historicize.
His Roma had given him what he’d failed to achieve all his life: an extension out of himself, a baby girl whom he named Fatima, after the Prophet’s daughter.
But like a good joke, the punchline hit him hard. His Roma died three years later. Pancreatic cancer. No family history, no alcoholism, and despite being seventeen years his junior, an athlete with a silver medal in synchronized swimming.
Hector had held this medal in his own hand, weighed the heft of its naked presence on the Big No’s Dickensian oak desk in Vienna, five years ago.
* * *
In the mid-to-late 2000s, Hector had been stationed in Europe. It was a unique arrangement with the National Clandestine Service, by which he worked part-time and got to roam the think tanks of the Old Continent as a political researcher. Hector still regarded that period as the peak of his life.
Until one day in December 2008, when his life’s curve began to come down.
The CIA had gotten word that the former secretary-general had grown a beard, started working on a memoir in Arabic, had reconnected with fringe activists in the Arab world. Had the ex-secretary-general, then, been radicalized? The Cardinal was on fire.
He showed up at Hector’s Stockholm apartment and ordered him to fly to Vienna pronto. “Someone needs to suss this guy out,” the then-director of the NCS said. “Ozgur is waiting for you there.”
And for six days and six nights, Hector and Ozgur lived in a white Ford Transit parked across from the Nomans’ Leopoldstadt address. The former secretary-general and his teenage daughter lived on the second floor of a building risen from the ashes of a synagogue zapped during the Reichskristallnacht. They seldom went out, seldom conversed, never received visitors.
“What are they doing here?” Hector marveled. “I would go back to Egypt if I were them.”
“Why don’t you?” Ozgur said.
“That’s exactly the point. I’m not.”
Viennese winter is solemn and lonely. But Ozgur, impeccably dressed up and perfumed as always, kept Hector entertained. They’d grown close over the years. Since their first meeting in New York in 2003, and later their joint surveillance of the starshy leytenant in Paris, they had forged a bond that served them well in various risky operations in Europe. Naturally, they had a lot to reminisce about while the Nomans were refusing to budge from the flat. That Algerian fellow who recruited imbeciles for al-Qaeda in Marseilles, remember the gay porn on his PC? Hah hah ha. And that chips factory near Prague, Ozzie, you threatened to throw a Pakistani ISI tracker inside one of those slicers. The guy bawled like a baby, “I’m not important, I’m not important, ask my wife!” And you said to him, “Well, if you’re not important, no one will miss you, uh?” And don’t forget the pharmacy explosion of Venice. Oh, my goodness. And the adventure with the Moroccan brothers who cooked tabun in a hot-dog cart in Brussels...
And they laughed and guzzled gallons of strong Viennese coffee, ate dangerous amounts of apple strudels and sachertortes, took turns showering in a single bedroom the Agency had suffered them at a nearby two-star hotel, and waited and waited for the impossible to happen, for the Nomans to be away from the flat at the same time.
Which didn’t happen until December 13, when the former secretary-general allowed his daughter to see him off at the airport, where he was scheduled to fly to Oran, Algeria, to attend the 151st OPEC Conference.
“I thought I’d die before they moved their butts,” Hector said.
“You go up,” said Ozgur. “I’ll call the boss and catch up.”
That had been the last time he’d seen Ozgur.
* * *
Weird, Fifi? Let me tell you what’s weird.
I found your hidden condoms, opened up your laptop and saw the nude pictures you sent to a boy called Jonas. I read your sexts. I photocopied your Gypsy Doll in Vienna diary. Your daddy’s memoir, Fifi? It was useless to us. Listen to this:
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Last night I dreamed of it. The rising East. The gestating Revolution in the hearts of millions. I am a prophet and to my prophecy I am wedlocked.
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Or this masterpiece:
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If humanity is ever to eradicate inequality, the Plebeians must rise and demolish their Idol... an Idol that the Patrician has sculpted especially for them... an Idol called Democracy!
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Crazy guy, huh?
Uh-unh. There is a better way of nailing him:
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A lazy bastard... an old fart who’s lost his male drive... a spewed-up cog of the system. Even in his country they don’t respect him so very much. What the hell am I doing here with him? He is totally insane!
I HATE him!!!!
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Sounds familiar? Your father, the man you despised in your diary, turned out to be the highest achiever of the century.
But you didn’t see that coming, Fatima. Did you? And neither did I.
I read your diary... and I believed you.
I advocated for you. Your shallow teenage epiphanies were my gospel. I copied whole passages of your “analysis” of your father into my memo. I dismissed the old man’s open declarations as manifestations of dementia. And because of you, I rammed my CIA career into a wall.
Fast-forward three years, and here we are, sitting right next to each other in this hell of a country.
That, Fifi... that is weird.
* * *
“I know what you’re thinking,” Hector said to her on the bus. “But you’re overthinking it like everybody else. They said they didn’t expect this haze till June, and I believe them. Pulauis are very good people, and I’d like everyone to give them a chance.”
“No, doctor, I mean something different.”
Recently, Fifi had fallen into this Egyptian habit of calling all her professors “doctor,” with a distinct Arabic drawl that made it sound more like “doc-tour.” But Hector took this as a good sign she was adapting well to her home country.
“Different like what?” he asked.
“Doctor, remember our class on realism? You said the currency of the international system was power, right?”
“Mearsheimer. Structural realism. Right.”
“But what is power, doc?”
“Well, that’s an interesting question, Fifi. Basically, what we mean by power in realist theory is military and economic might. The governing structure of the international system is—”
“Anarchy,” she said.
“I knew you were paying attention in class.”
He hoped the sarcasm in his words wasn’t audible. For many months now, Fifi had been skipping classes and asking for extraordinary extensions for her assignments. The reason for that being her daddy’s new political venture: Tamarod, which stood for “mutiny” in Arabic. Tamarod sought to depose the Muslim-Brotherhood president of Egypt and redo the last election. It had come as a shock to most CIA analysts who’d thought the Big No’s first memoir—blasphemous anti-democratic babble—had been a satire. Fifi’s activism had negatively affected her school performance, and she probably wouldn’t pass at all if she wasn’t, A, famous, and B, the dean’s niece.
Now she laughed and covered her big lips. “Sorry, doctor. Of course I wasn’t. How can you say that? You know how crazy things are right now.”
“Then I’m glad you’ve found the time to come with us on this trip,” Hector said.
She fidgeted in her seat. “I just needed a vacation. Cairo is like a warzone. I don’t know when things will settle down if they ever will. Everyone is like everyone’s enemy for no good reason.”
“That’s what we call democracy, Fifi.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s what Hitler and Lenin had said, before they came to power. Dad thinks the Muslim Brotherhood are even worse. They’ll kill us all if they think we stand between them and the Caliphate.”
Hector shook his head, then decided to change the subject. “How’s Ernest, by the way? You guys in touch?”
Ernest was a former student and friend of Hector’s. Yet ever since he’d left Cairo, he’d neither called nor emailed Hector. Hector had tried to reach him on an old email account he had, but there had been no reply.
“Oh, yeah. He mentioned this same subject the other week, said anarchy was the rule in today’s world. And he mentioned you, too, doctor.”
“Really? What’d he say?”
“Not much. Just that he misses everyone. He misses Cairo and the shisha and the Revolution and everything. He says life in DC sucks. He just sits there at his desk and does nothing.”
Ernest had a privileged but unusual background. He was the illegitimate son of Prince Mohamed bin Hakam, a fact which Ernest himself hadn’t been privy to until three years ago. Following his son’s smooth graduation from AIMES in October, Prince bin Hakam had called in his chits with Washington to secure a stable job for his American son. Now Prince Mohamed was so popular in Washington that his son wouldn’t need to do any work to get paid. To say that some people had it too easy was an understatement.
“That’s post-graduation blues for you,” Hector said. “Tell him to stick to his job in the Treasury. Most fresh grads wouldn’t dream of being in his shoes right now, especially in this economy.”
“But he hates it. It sucks his soul.” She shook her vast forest of brown curls. “What a waste of talent. Ernest was the best of us.”
Hector saw fit now to return to the original subject. “Anway, Fifi, to answer your question, realists believe that our world compels states to seek power. Call it leverage, security, or peace if you will. Si vis pacem para bellum.”
“Oh, I know what that means. If you want peace, prepare for war.”
The phrase was from Hector’s first lecture this summer. He deemed his students worthy of a passing grade if they retained this single line from Vegetius: It summed up the entire discipline of political science.
“Good job,” he said. “So states constantly amass weapons, compete over resources, seek out investments. And that, Fifi, that is power.”
Fifi turned this over in her mind before posing a subquestion. “And people?”
“What about them?”
“Do countries compete with one other over the number of their human resources, too?”
Now that was a tricky question, and Hector knew exactly where it’d originated. Kero, of course. Being a persecuted Coptic Christian in Islamic Egypt, Kero was perhaps too fond of alt-right propaganda.
“Well, Fifi, I’m not saying demography is completely out of the question. The common wisdom has always been that demography is the mother of all politics. But still... Africa is very populous, and it’s not powerful in any sense of the word.”
Fifi was silent awhile, gazing out her window. “Doctor, they’re funding this trip. Right?”
“They’re good and generous people.”
“Why?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“What’s in it for them?”
Hector tried to hide his face. He looked back at the rearview mirror and saw the luggage warfare still in full swing. “Don’t worry about them, Fifi. Pulau has a first-world economy. They can afford to be curious about us.”
“I know exactly what they’re doing,” she said. “They’re trying to be friends with my dad. But it’s pointless. Dad doesn’t care. He doesn’t even care about me.”
“Don’t say that. I’m sure your father loves you very much.”
“You don’t know him. He’s doesn’t know how to relate to people.”
To say that about the man who mobilized the biggest revolution in human history was rather uncanny. Hector remembered her stupid diary and cursed himself for not seeing this teenage know-it-all-ness in advance. “The more you grow, the more you lose touch with your parents,” said the man who lost his only son, the man who was only eleven at his parents’ funeral. “That’s a fact of life you need to get used to.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, anyway,” she said flatly.
After the bags were somehow crammed in the trunk, Hector’s male students began filing onto the bus. Baxter squeezed his way past Hector and Fifi, smiling like a prized boxer. Kero followed and plopped in the seat behind them, ballooning and deflating his thin cheeks. Ahmed lurched through to his wife in the back, his prayer mark like a painful bruise on his forehead. Both Ahmed and Zainab were members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Zainab was born into the creed, and her husband had married his way in only last month. Still, it was Ahmed who was more outspoken and, thereby, hated. Yubi rose the instant she spotted him coming her way.
Pointing her middle finger at Ahmed, Fifi said, audible enough, “Why is he even with us on this trip? He’s a terrorist.”
“Shshsh, shshsh,” Hector hissed. “That’s not a nice thing to say about a classmate, Fifi.”
Finally, Mr Li climbed on the bus. He kicked the door shut and turned to glower at them all with his pinpoint eyes. “Next time you put masks inside bus!” he roared. “We take no disease from Africa.”
Then he clambered to his right-sided seat, and started the engine.