2

THE GARBAGE MAN WAS GENTLE with the girls. They had done his bidding all day. He’d never have imagined that the older girl would respond so readily. He hadn’t bothered with the younger one at all. The older girl would act like a grown woman, would grasp his cock, squeeze it, play with it. The garbage man tried to take the young girl’s hand and teach her how, but she didn’t pick it up like the other one, she wasn’t a pro, and most of the time the older girl would take her place and lead him where he wanted to go. But there was something missing. His pleasure wasn’t complete. The girl’s body was too young. Didn’t do the job. But he treated it as though it were a proper body—better than any image he could dream up, better than the fantasies he’d lived with—and he made himself a little promise: in a few years’ time, she’d have a real body, would be a real woman for him to own.

But the garbage man was thinking ahead. Circumstances could change. She might find herself a handsome, strong, young man with an undamaged face and two good eyes, who walked erect and didn’t stumble. A fellow like this might come along, and they’d fall in love, and she’d leave him. But the young one here would tie her down. They wouldn’t leave together unless two young men came along at once. At this point, the garbage man became truly angry. With all the losses he’d suffered before, the thought of a future without either of the girls enraged him. They were all he had now. Even the trash he ate from every day, piled up in pyramids in the middle of the road, didn’t belong to him.

The garbage man was fed up with his home beneath the bridge. It wasn’t a home, just a place to sleep. What he dreamed of was a place in one of the many heaps of garbage here. He’d dig into the side of one of them, would excavate a tunnel into the center of the pyramid. Nothing to worry about: it wouldn’t fall down and he’d grown used to the smell long ago. He was careful to keep a little rotten food beside him—when he slept, when he sat on the sidewalk, as the older girl was playing with his cock; at all times, in order not to forget that smell. So that he could never smell anything but it. He also made sure to imprint it in the girls’ minds. How could they live with him if they weren’t used to the stench of decay?

When he reached the pyramid’s dead center, he would set about widening the tunnel. A tunnel no longer: he would carve out the middle of the pyramid into two bedrooms and a large lounge. Of course, he’d need planks to prop up the ceiling and walls. He’d steal them from the building site next to the pyramids or from the lumberyard nearby.

He’d be able to dig the tunnel quick enough, four to five months say, though then again maybe a year was more like it, then another year to carve out the bedrooms and living room. Two years after starting work, he would be living in this house of his, and the big girl would be fully grown, and he’d sit on the floor in the living room, leaning against an empty box and waiting for her to fetch him his food. Two years was a long time, true, but the garbage man was in no hurry. What mattered was that no one could know what he was up to. If people found out what he was doing, they’d dig in the other trash pyramids—there were many pyramids, but they’d all be used up in the end—and the whole place, repellent to nose and eyes alike, would be transformed into a busy neighborhood like those around it. And then, any one of them might overextend his living room, and the pyramid would collapse on his head and those of his companions. The garbage man came here to get away from people and from their buildings, which he loathed. He wanted to live in one, but he loathed them all the same. Living here was his idea, and his alone. No one else would ever get a piece of it. He was prepared to kill anyone who threatened the success of this idea.

The garbage man dreamed. A dream of his one and only trip to see the pyramids of Giza. This scene from years before replayed itself, and it was only after he’d woken that he remembered he’d been a boy when he’d visited them and could begin to unpick reality from his dream. He recalled visiting the pyramids with classmates: walking along in a double line of schoolboys, two by two, a teacher at the head of the line and another at the tail. But the dream passed hazily over the reason for the visit and the faces of his companions and skipped straight to the tour guide’s speech: “Pyramids are huge tombs. Dwelling places, too, perhaps. Pyramids could be anything and everything.” So the tour guide had said, and the garbage man had never forgotten his words. And when he woke and emerged from his little house beneath the overpass, he saw the pyramids of garbage ranked neatly and pleasingly in a single line, and birds aplenty circling over them and alighting, and he said to himself, “Those are truly pretty pyramids, fit to live in.”

He finished his daily rounds. He scavenged food for lunch and someone gave him a cigarette. He begged eight pounds and someone gave him another cigarette. He pictured the older girl holding the cigarette and breathing out smoke. He smiled and blood coursed through his veins. He was aroused, his cock stood up, and he looked forward to a fun-filled night.

Beneath the overpass, the garbage man sat on the ground. The two girls lay beside him, and the sounds of the cars that passed by a few meters overhead head were clearly audible. The light of the setting sun bathed the overpass’s metal frame, and it stored the heat away, ready to discharge it into the air once the sun was gone. He was so thirsty. He lifted a bottle of water to his mouth and drank, then went outside to piss against the nearest of the bridge’s columns. When he turned to go back to his little hiding place, he saw a group of young men approaching the overpass. They stood by his house and started peering in at the two girls through gaps in the planks and cardboard sheets. A second group came toward him, watching him very carefully and leaving their laughter behind with their companions, who were now trying to open the little door. They formed a barrier between the garbage man and his home. They were holding wooden staves, short lengths of piping, and cables.

They made him sit down. The sun had set, few cars drove overhead, and there was nobody in the street. Each and every one of them went into the little house and did as he pleased, raping the older girl, who submitted to them all, while the young one in the corner mostly hid her eyes. And the garbage man was outside, and afraid. He wanted it all to end without trouble—for them to get bored or for them to finish fucking her. He could hear her faint squeals and could now anticipate exactly when she’d make them. He felt no sorrow for her.

One of them was penetrating her and she cried out. The garbage man heard the sound and told himself that the cry was surely a cry of pain, but he did not get up and chase them away. They would get angry and might overpower him. He wanted it all to be over quickly. The girl wanted the one on top of her to be done quickly. The men wanted the same thing themselves.

And now the men waiting their turn began to beat him. The garbage man received their blows in silence. Fighting back, he knew, would only provoke them. They were in raptures. They had decided to beat him until they were too tired to go on, and he told himself he’d take it—the garbage he ate each day had left him strong and able to endure. The blows to his head were very painful. After several of these, he could no longer feel the pain or the blood that flowed down his face.

Even after they were done and gone, the garbage man stayed seated. He wasn’t strong enough to stand. From within the shack, he could hear the girl weeping softly.

A maimed tomcat stepped past him. Decrepit, its face blank and tail filthy, it stalked past him very slowly. Very slowly indeed. There were smears of dried blood in its fur. The garbage man reached out his arm and struck it with his fist. It didn’t shy or jerk away like a cat would normally do. The punch shifted it sideways, but it went on walking without giving him a glance. On it went, leaving behind the man, and the house, and the soft weeping, and stepped down off the sidewalk to cross the road, heedless of the cars flashing by before its nose—heedless of the car that tried to stop before it struck. The driver stamped the brakes and the tires screeched. He almost managed it, but then another car struck him from behind and rolled him over the cat.

Wreckage from the two cars scattered, the drivers got out, and each started blaming the other. The tomcat had disappeared completely. The garbage man peered over, but he couldn’t see it. Then he started crawling toward his little house, the blood running from his head and into his eyes.

At night, Zahra began to talk to Insal in her childish voice, and he did his best to answer her questions. She constructed her sentences with difficulty and her tone of voice would lift at the end of each statement to lend it the stamp of inquiry. Zahra had learned to question—and at an age when other children asked questions of their fathers, she was asking hers of this stranger.

So his wife Leila was gone, his stillborn child was as safe as could be, and Zahra’s father was dead. No one at home but Zahra and Insal, who stretched out on the bed and thought: I’ll adopt her. She’ll be my daughter, mine alone.

Insal drifted away, gazing at Zahra’s sleeping face beside him, sketching out a happy future for them both, father and daughter; and maybe Leila would return or he’d convince her to come back and raise Zahra with him.

In the morning, Insal woke to Zahra’s moans. He was lying down, and he sat up, and by the faint sunlight filtering between the shutter’s slats saw that something was wrong with her mouth. She was crying bitterly. He got up and switched on the light, then came back to bed to find that the skin on her face had spread and was growing over her lips. A strange, wrinkled skin. He saw Zahra’s skin creeping out from either side of her mouth and covering it, spreading out and covering the lips; sealing up the mouth.

But what was happening wasn’t causing her pain. It only constricted her mouth. Her fingers felt an unfamiliar thickening when she tried touching her lips. Insal started to press down on the delicate membrane in an attempt to understand what had happened. The skin hadn’t spread over the lips as he’d assumed; the flesh was fusing. The two lips were slowly joining, the mouth’s muscles and internal tissues slowly cleaving together. Even as Insal was dressing, was counting his change, was getting ready to leave the house and take Zahra to the doctor, the mouth was joining up and the open hole growing smaller. It looked to Insal as though the mouth would close up completely in a matter of hours.

He picked her up, her body tense and trembling, his hot with distress. Her face was damp with tears. Insal’s happy dreams fled away. Zahra might never be cured; maybe the doctor wouldn’t know what was wrong with her. Insal tried to remember if anyone had ever been afflicted with something like this. A disease he’d heard of, perhaps, that an acquaintance had had? He tried to recall if he’d ever seen something similar. He couldn’t think of anything. He signaled for a taxi and set off for the nearest hospital.

All day long, Insal traipsed around the hospital carrying Zahra, from nurse to doctor, from bed to bed. They snipped away a small sample of the self-generating skin from over her lips and took some of her blood, and at least a dozen doctors examined her face—all of them silent, their expressions unmoved. What was happening was quite normal, Insal thought to himself. If everything that’s going on around us these days is normal, then what’s happening to Zahra is normal, too. This is no disease.

At the end of the day, in the evening, they asked him to go with Zahra to a room. They would both stay there overnight.

They had been feeding Zahra mashed food, which she very nearly refused to take, only her hunger prompting her to accept it. She hated it, particularly since she had to spoon it in through the small gap that remained of her mouth, chewing it a little, then swallowing. They gave her a sedative, and a few minutes later she surrendered to sleep.

Insal slept fitfully. Every few minutes, he opened his eyes to peer into Zahra’s face and check that she was sleeping. Then he’d close his eyes once more and drift off. When he opened them and found her twisted over in the pose of someone lost in oblivion, he was reassured. At least she was feeling no pain now. She was deep asleep.

The next morning, he saw that her mouth had closed completely. The little opening at its center had disappeared, her lips gone forever, and in the daylight that came in through the window Zahra began to mewl. The sound escaped her nose and Insal wondered if he was dreaming. He must be. He sprinted screaming from the room.

The doctors were very sorry. What was happening was most unusual, they informed him. They’d never seen it before. They knew that once human organs stopped moving they gradually died, the muscles withering and then disappearing altogether. Even before that happened, the limb was usually done for, incapable of functioning. Yet what was happening to Zahra was different: a film of tissue had grown to seal the space between her lips; the lips had melded together, and the mouth’s opening had vanished without cause or reason. But analysis of her blood and endocrine functions confirmed that Zahra was quite all right. She was in no real danger.

There was a solution, one doctor said, but it was as unconventional as Zahra’s condition. A surgeon could open her lips, passing his scalpel down the old line of her mouth and forcing it apart, then suture the edges to stop the bleeding. A quick, effective, surgical solution—much better than hunting through books and trying to treat the condition with drugs.

But Zahra was not his daughter, and he would have to hand her back to her people one day. His dreams were all forgotten now. She wasn’t going to live with him forever—she would never be his daughter. Insal wished it were so with all his heart, but he knew deep down that he was taking her as a replacement for his dead boy, and when he found her relatives they would never forgive him for acting on the doctor’s suggestion. Her father, unjustly killed and buried in a pauper’s grave, would not forgive him either. They would meet in the afterlife, unclothed, and the father would chastise him for what he had done: How dare you? How could you disfigure Zahra’s face? He would never forgive him and would demand that he be punished. Insal clung to hope—one day, he thought, she would return to normal. One day she would wake, her mouth parted in a beautiful smile, her lips whole, without the scalpel’s scars and the marks of the surgeon’s thread.

Zahra submitted to everyone who milled around her. The doctors fetched a thin silicone tube. They carefully introduced one end of this into her nostril, pushing it a few centimeters in, and when it stopped as if encountering an obstruction they leaned her head back and gently resumed the attempt, persisting until they had passed it through her nose and down her gullet to her stomach. This was Zahra’s new mouth. They fetched a bowl of purée of indeterminate hue, and with a syringe began to squirt it slowly into the end of the tube. Zahra put up no resistance. She stopped crying. Something strange was inside her, a foreign body, and food was passing through it into her insides. Lots of people stood around her. The reek of illness. Its stench was everywhere here: the smell of a young man who’d passed away just a minute before; the smell of two more who’d burned to death; from the nurse who stood over her the smell of blood she’d come to know in recent days; sweat from the exhausted doctor who moved back and forth before her, his body numb from the powerful tranquilizers he took each day and without which he was unable to do his work.

Then, as the purée slid through the tube into her belly, another fleeting smell filled the air, soothing her. A lovely sensation enveloped her as her stomach filled. The taste of what she’d eaten was gone, but the smell was there.

The doctors, the nurse, and Insal departed, and Zahra remained behind on the bed. The end of the tube dangled from her nose, sealed by the nurse with a flexible, see-through cap so that nothing inside her would seep out, but the smell of illness continued to fill the room.

Insal broke down before the doctor, told him he didn’t want to see her fed like that for the rest of her life; that he’d prefer for her to die than live like that; that it would mean constant torment for her and for him; that what was happening was rank injustice; that she had never done anything to deserve all this pain.

The tranquilizers that flowed in the doctor’s veins left him feeling weightless, sure of himself and sure of his performance, and Insal’s pleas were absolutely standard. He’d heard them dozens of times before from patient’s relatives on the brink of nervous breakdown, and these were no different. The same words, the same pain, and the tranquilizers made it all ridiculous and repetitive. As the sentences followed one after the other, the doctor was thinking, Yep. . . Whatever. . . . Sure. . . Get to the point, please. . . . No cure. . . . No food other than by catheter. . . . It’s called a catheter, yes. . . . Forget a complete recovery. . . . Illness is sent to try us. . . . I know. . . . I know, I know. . . . Aren’t you going to shut up, friend . . . ? The girl’ll be dead in days. . . . Give me a break. . . .

After just a few months on the job, the doctor had become certain that everything happening around him was utterly meaningless, that he must not allow himself to be affected by the death of a patient; he might even take pleasure in the death of one of the long-term inmates—the sufferer relieved of his cares, the relatives relieved, the doctor too. Some cases were terminal, and he had to go to extraordinary lengths to treat them. This girl, for instance—her case was far from usual, the first recorded case in history, it seemed, and yet it was up to him to deal with her.

People were being killed out there. Dozens a day, he’d heard. They were truly at peace: no more suffering for them. The doctor reflected that nothing they would encounter in hell could be worse than what they’d seen on earth. And then, on top of it all, along comes this man and his daughter to waste his time and the hospital’s. A simple calculation told him that the girl had just days to live. She would be unable to survive for long fed through a silicone tube. Soon she’d be needing solids. Her poor mental state would affect her physical health. Perhaps she’d get an infection from the tube that sat inside her. Then he thought of his alternative solution, not to relieve the girl’s suffering, but so that he might be shot of her and her father. He would get a surgeon to open the mouth. A mutilation, no two ways about it, but she would at least eat normally. Her lips would never be the same again, though, and maybe they had even turned into tissue of a different kind.

At the end of the day, following an intensive examination, one of the surgeons decided that he would perform the operation the next day. Cost no object, he said: he’d do it for free because it was an exceptional case. Insal wouldn’t pay a penny.

Insal agreed.

They lay together on the bed, waiting for tomorrow. In the darkness, Zahra passed her palm over his face. She felt his mouth and nose, brushed his closed eyes, and touched his eyebrows, reached out and pinched the lobe of his left ear before returning to his mouth and nose. Her father’s smell had receded in her memory, and that of Insal was carving out a place for itself inside her.

This permanently fearful man, this man in pain, this man loves me and does not know me. I can smell his love but his fear upsets me. Don’t be afraid. You know, fear is not for grown-ups, fear is for us little ones alone, and when I grow up I shall not be afraid. I shall no longer know the smell of my own fear.

Asleep, Insal saw that he had become a volcano, a volcano called Krakatoa. He was walking across a vast expanse floored with glowing white tiles, and on all sides thin iron columns rose into the air. Krakatoa was walking between the thin columns and not understanding what they were, and after a while he came across Zahra, who had turned into a naked wooden doll. All her joints seemed to be made of cheap wood and her hair was synthetic, but the face was hers. There was this metal rod sticking out of her, a kind of tail, which emitted sounds whenever she moved, like vast machines turning over in a factory. The doll was wandering all here and there between the thin columns, gazing over at Krakatoa for moments at a time, then averting her face and drifting away again. And every time she moved, her metal tail would thrash with its sound of vast machinery.

Krakatoa saw a thin whip in the doll’s hand, and then he saw her cracking the whip over her head, striking at something he couldn’t see, something above the columns. He decided to find out what was up there, and calmly and slowly he rose up, flew up, until he saw that the columns were the legs of many beds with white quilts and coverlets laid out over them. He saw that the beds were scattered around at random, and that was why their legs had seemed like a forest of thin trunks.

On the beds, men lay on their backs—and the doll’s whip floated out over them, then down in quick, short strokes. And then other whips rose up to strike at other men, and when Krakatoa drew near to one and peered at him, he saw that the man was missing a face, missing the skin on his face, and he knew that someone had peeled the skin off all these faces with surgical precision. The face had been cut from hairline to chin, and from ear to ear, then lifted away to leave the head faceless. The delicate muscles showed bloody, the teeth white and lipless, and eyes stared upward without lids, their gaze unwavering despite the stinging whip.

Krakatoa started screaming at the wooden doll: “Enough, Leila! Zahra, enough!” And why Krakatoa was calling her Leila when he knew she was Zahra, he couldn’t say.

Then he knew that those stretched out were dead, and that even so the wooden doll was tormenting them. The doll was tormenting the dead.

Krakatoa wanted to understand what he was. He knew that he was a famous volcano. Many years before, he had exploded in a mighty eruption, the sound of which could be heard far away. But he thought that there must have been some kind of mistake, that he wasn’t Krakatoa. That he was something else. Then, in the far, far distance, he spied a mirror, so he flew toward it to look into it and to know what he was.

The sound of the vast machines swelled and the whip strokes gathered in intensity, while the men stayed as they were, lying on their backs, and as Insal drew near to the mirror the sound of the machines increased greatly in volume, and Insal awoke.

It was dawn. In the dark, Insal wrapped Zahra’s body in a blanket and took her away. He knew that hospital security would try to stop him, and when he got to the entrance he sprinted out and away from the guard, who chased after him for a few yards and then fell back.

He wouldn’t leave Zahra with the doctors to be opened up by knives. He ran, picturing the scalpel passing smoothly over skin and making a small opening—a little bleeding—and then the wound closing up a second later despite the efforts of the doctor, who, amazed, reopens it again, only for it to close once more, obstinate and unrelenting. Zahra would stay dumb forever, would never speak or eat, would take her food from a tube through her nose.

Insal dashed on, Zahra in his arms, and when he grew tired, he walked. No one was about. People were fed up with chasing gangsters and standing guard over their buildings, and the streets stood empty with only a few exceptions: those returning from the square with a blend of hope and fear—and, somewhere not far off, the dog man, hard at work, gathering bodies into his cart as he did each day, while his dogs combed the neighborhood in search of more.