He was nothing now. All that he was was burnt as fuel.
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Author:
Tufto. This is their 2022 Art Exchange gift for
LightlessLantern. More of their work can be found here.
It is winter, and Farhad Esfandiari is about to die.
The container is rapidly filling up with water. He scrambles to the far end, cursing, feeling the weight of the metal as it starts to tip forward. The pocket of air is closing around him. This time, there is no way out.
Faint drips squeeze their way through the corners. He starts to shout, not knowing why, because nobody will hear. The shipping container has been dropped out of the side of the ship and is bleeding from the outside in. Does he think someone will hear? He's not sure. There isn't much time to think.
Maybe it's instinct. Who wouldn't shout? It won't help, but nothing will, so he falls back on that old habit, that childish habit. Like a familiar glove.
Farhad bangs on the roof of the container. Nothing. He starts to yell, more incessantly. He scrawls his feet up the side. A creaking sound is heard. The bottom sinks more quickly. He can almost taste the frost.
It is spring. Farhad, a child, runs up to the door of the house. His father is inside, talking with the men from Tehran.
It's a green day, on the northern slopes of the Alborz. To Farhad, Iran, the Iran he knows, is the green grasses of Mazandaran, which always look too lush to be real. The idea of Iran as anything other than riverland, foliage and distant peaks is anathema to him. The Dasht-e Kavir is a distant idea. Tehran's smog is a half-remembered visit from years ago.
Farhad is an aeroplane. He runs around from door to tree, arms outstretched, blowing a constant hum with his mouth. Here the explosives fall! Here he comes running, plotting out landings and runways and bombs falling fast. The heroes win, the bunker is destroyed!
Inside, his father twists the signet ring on his finger, sighing. The men in front of him are getting more insistent. He can hear his son's voice outside, ringing, bright. He leans forward and signs the papers.
It is summer. Farhad scratches at his neck and sighs. Opposite him, Yasmin winces slightly, angrily. Farhad can't seem to do anything but sigh now.
Everyone but the two of them has gone home. The sun sets, orange pastels blending into the circling clouds. It's too late for work, and besides, the air conditioning has broken. But they stay in the office regardless, procrastinating, finding new tasks to catch up on.
Farhad continues to type. The hum of machinery is all around. Fluorescent lights bear down overhead.
"You can just go." Yasmin's voice is clipped, hurt. Farhad doesn't understand why but doesn't have the energy to worry about it. It's just Yasmin, who has slipped into his life like a familiar ache, something so inextricable that it's hardly noticeable.
"There's too much to do." It's a lie, but not because he wants to avoid a conversation. He's fine with that kind of conversation, full of hurt and recrimination. What he's not fine with is his work.
The storage lockers beneath the Office for the Reclamation of Islamic Artifacts are full of the reclaimed and unprocessed. Each item must be properly researched, analysed, studied. In this regard, they are like the Foundation, but with a shoestring budget and a more focused, worn-out workforce.
Each item, in those black corridors, sitting in cardboard boxes or tarnished metal, sits glowing or undulating in its own strange light. Where possible, they are truly reclaimed; returned to their countries and towns of origin, to ancient shrines or long-buried tombs. This is the real purpose of the job, this slow healing. The world cannot be made whole again, before the carracks came onto the Hormuz skyline, but some sense of continuity can be preserved. In scattered places and lonely pasts, what was can become what is.
But the other objects are the ones that can be weaponised. And they have to be weaponised. All day long, dragging themselves from foxholes and slums, mountain hideouts and urban cells, the tattered band of the ORIA sets up its defences and its traps.
Great columns haunted by the elder djinn are set up on snow-white peaks. There is no money for surveillance, so this will have to do. A section director stares into the Cup of Jamshid to prevent it from falling into the Foundation's hands, altering the convoy's route, determining the safest path from Tehran to Shiraz.
In Europe, an Indonesian woman is stopped by the police. She prays they do not search her; such an unexpected mercy is her only defence against the Foundation being alerted to the Ilkhanid lustre tile she has stolen. She has become, over many years, extraordinarily sensitive to the minutiae of these situations; of the way the blonde German looks at her, contempt and curiosity, of the official and careful words he speaks. She gives sullen but precise responses. She knows she has to.
In New Orleans, a man skips stones over the water. He is waiting. He has been waiting for many years. There is a page from a copy of the Shahname composed in Delhi in the late 16th century. It was commissioned for a Mughal noble to celebrate the Islamic millenium. The pages move in their own time, and the experience of reading it is to feel the illustrations swimming, spinning, transforming matter to matter. And a collector ripped it to shreds to sell it in pieces. So this man waits, until the old-fashioned radio in his pocket will whir into reality, to tell him which house in the city contains the next fragment, the next moment in his singular life.
All along the line, the ORIA drags itself up. Not with glamour, or smoothness, but with sudden fits and starts. They do their work efficiently, quietly, desperately, always feeling the black and fated contours of their tightrope. The metropole kicks down; the colony bites back.
It is high summer, and there is no retreat for them. There's only the life buzzing all around, contagious, filling the air with toxins. And Farhad does not want to enter the office's bowels, to find that locker in the lower floors, to see his own bitter fruits.
It is autumn, and Farhad watches as Yasmin leaves the house.
She walks down the steps, adjusting her headscarf. Leaves blow past the streetlight; it is dawn, and the first red light scores the street in indigo and russet browns. There's a soft squelch as Yasmin's boots trudge through the detritus.
He is holding open the curtain. It has been nine months since he finally plucked up the courage to go downstairs and visit the locker, and he has had to watch Yasmin become like the others, but only in his presence. Little of her youthful fire has survived his experience. Now she nurses him, day by day, quietly and efficiently checking on his moods and his temperament.
Sometimes he lashes out, calling her names, trying to find some word to cut her with. She knows it is not real. She quietly corrects him, reproaches him, and he apologises. He always apologises. The weary look when she raises her head, her love for him a kind of binding of its own…
The stress, that's the word. The pressure and the tension, the tautness. He didn't understand it before, but he does now. Maybe everyone at the ORIA does, when they look into the locker.
Yasmin is beyond his eyes' reach. He didn't quite see when she turned the corner. He gets up from the chair and heads towards the bathroom with his slow and heavy gait. He wants it to be spring again. The flowers are so lovely in the spring.
It is winter, and Farhad doesn't know what happened last night at all.
His uncle has been clandestinely brewing alcohol in his basement. Lots of people do it, but his uncle's wide grin and perpetual bustle make the entire thing seem more slapdash, more unsafe. Heaven knows what would happen if he was caught.
But Farhad is just 18 here, newly started at university. He is assiduous by day, writing notes and brushing his clothes carefully. He is neat and friendly, an extroverted figure about the campus. But as people get to know him more and more, over a cup of tea or on a walk by the river, they find that he hides an inner bitterness. He bundles his scarf up around his ears, and watches the city crumble on by.
This city, he says, is hidden in a veil. It's not a veil you can see, just one that others can; that the outsiders, the farangi, can. Each city of the world is connected by wires, electric and humming, full of nervous energy - but not Tehran. Tehran is bypassed. The city of shahs and smog is a name few can call to mind. It cannot be plotted on the Westerners' mental maps.
His friends don't understand the bitterness this provokes in him. It's a special, careful kind of bitterness. Farhad is not a nationalist; he doesn't believe in cheaply coloured storybooks. And he's not an loyalist either, recognising the hollow scratching eyes you need to still believe in the Islamic Republic. No; he's someone standing apart from the crowd, descending into a mute and brooding cynicism, the only way he knows to carve his own tunnel from the confusion. Maybe if his standards are beyond any earthly height, he might one day find some measure of truth.
So he gets drunk on his uncle's foul concoction, and cannot remember the last night on the next morning. And that scares him - really scares him. To lack a memory is to not feel its lack; one moment you were somewhere, the next you were here. Farhad sees his self as the accumulation of experience; so isn't this missing part of his life the loss of a part of himself?
But at the same time, it is intoxicating. Now, for a second, he understands the point of jihad. The mujahideen who can annihilate himself in the struggle. In his wiped and scrubbed memory, he senses a kind of relief; there is no need for truth if there is no sense of self. There's only whatever action took place last night, devoid of the meaning that memory gives it. It does not matter what virtues or crimes he committed; only the knowledge that they took place. Matter that is both potential and realised; the end to all struggle.
He stares blearily at his ceiling, and pushes the thoughts out of his head. His shirt smells and he reeks of drink. He needs to take a shower, and get himself ready for the day ahead.
It is spring. Farhad, an old man, limps away from the building.
He's worked there for fifty years. First he was an agent, then a supervisor, then a regional director. Now he is the head, the chief. The building is much the same as it was; the regime is different, but the flow of capital remains, merely intensified.
His boots crumple the flowers beneath him. He has transformed this place. The ORIA has beaten the Foundation, the GOC, all of them. Agents file through offices, making jokes, striding with confidence and proud of their lofty heights. Protest movements in the West are becoming revolutions. Factories across Africa and Asia close down, mines are left abandoned. The entire system is being wracked with the pains he always dreamt of. Freedom is, now, a real possibility.
All the same… he misses it. He misses the strung-out nights that made this possible. He misses the deadened faces of his colleagues, the dedication that defied hope. He misses being invisible in the crowd instead of invisible on the mountaintop.
The moon is round and full. A car alarm goes off in the distance. He reaches his car, and climbs inside. His daughter is always telling him not to drive at night, that his eyesight isn't good any more. She fusses, of course, because she loves him. But this time, he can't help himself.
The back roads lead towards the mountains. He drives for hours, until all that's left of Tehran is a glinting set of lights in the distance. He stops, gets out, and heads to the grass on the side of the road, remembering this place, remembering the summer…
It is, of course, summer. Farhad, exhausted from running and playing, is lying on the side of a hillock. His mother is reading a book, some distance away. There are flowers on her dress. She has removed her headscarf, looking around furtively.
Farhad stares at the sky, admiring the clouds. The same clouds seen all across the Alborz, across Mazandaran probably. They're holidaying in Tehran, and came up to the mountainside to see the country, get some fresh air, his mother said. He stretches out his arms in the utter contentment of a child, waiting to see what fresh impulse will toss him to and fro.
If the clouds can be seen across all the north, then the sky can be seen across the whole world. Oh, in some places it's dark, it's night where here it's day, but it's all still the same. They can just see behind the veil, behind the veil of blue.
Or - what if the blue sky is what's real, and the stars are just a cover over them? What if they're the veil? And he sees, in his mind's eye, himself floating through an infinite vacuum, of planets and asteroids and aliens, only to pierce into something beyond that. Something not empty but all-consuming, vast, terrible…
It is autumn. Yasmin has gone.
He doesn't know when it happened. She was his last sprig of individuality, even if he hadn't realised it. As he drowned further and further into himself, Yasmin provoked, dragged, hauled him back up. She'd left the ORIA some time back, but hadn't left him.
But Yasmin had left. Yasmin had to leave. She couldn't keep orbiting him, she said, or she'd go mad the way he'd gone mad. So she packed her things, and didn't look back, and sauntered through the door and out of his world. None of her fire remained, but she was rigid, straight-backed, like a lightning-struck tree. Her skin and clothes seemed polished white from the inside out.
And he walks around his house, and feels so terribly afraid. He remembers his hangover from his uncle's pocket brewery. He remembers playing as an aeroplane while his father signed away his childhood home. He remembers many things and feels as though he is falling into a pit, grasping for a tightrope that does not come.
He remembers, above all, the contents of the locker.
It is winter. He is crawling across the Sahara. The GOC took everything, scorched it alive, gas masks on their face and great cylinders on their backs. The shrine is dead ash, but he has its fragment in his jacket. He clings to it for warmth, feeling the rod of pure fire warm him back. There are miles to go, but it must be done. The object must be reclaimed.
It is spring. He is in the dead place, the coldest cavern, climbing into a hole where hundreds have become stuck and died, pinned between rocks. If he makes a single wrong step, he is dead, the lingering death of madness, in the dark and the cold. Nobody knows he is here. But he hears the songs of sirens beneath him, and takes out the tape recorder, to claw out of this mine whatever melodies still remain within.
It is summer. He is not burnt or submerged but frozen, camped out in a miserable tent under a gargantuan blizzard. His thoughts are no longer real here. The frost preserves them whole but bloodless, smooth and ice-shined. The sky is blue. The glacier is blue. And beneath him, at last, he sees the ifrit's face, cold and dead, come closer to the surface. She is perfectly preserved; a true mummy. The directors will be happy she is dead.
It is autumn. The world burns bright. It snarls, chasing him through the woodlands, pursues him between the trees. He is running as fast as he is able, not daring to turn and see the thing that scratches his back. There are no words. There is just the stretching, the necessity, the sightline at the edge of the trees, the prey instinct…
It is winter, and Farhad Esfandiari belongs to the ORIA. He belongs to it utterly and without remorse. There is only injustice, the imbalance of capital, and the remedy. He belongs to it because he was a charcoal wreck of a man, and as part of it, is that no more.
It is winter, and Farhad opens the window to the locker's interior.
The locker's interior is an object stolen from the Foundation, some thirty years before. It refracts one's personal timeline to show a moment at will, from all different angles. Farhad is looking at a shipping container sinking, a bubble of air evaporating, his own form from three years ago struggling and shouting.
He cannot understand. He remembers the cold water lapping at his ankles and the creaking beyond desperation, beyond what could be borne. And then he remembers the rivets and joints above him being bent apart, and the water rushing in…
But what had teased the walls apart was a pair of hands, which lifted him to the surface, dragged him back to shore. It had been a hazy heat-mist, somewhere in the rainforest. Spluttering and coughing, he had looked around wildly, only to see a figure disappear into the trees. He had no idea who that person was.
But here, seeing the moment from all angles at once - a sublime paradox - he could see clearly. It had no fixed body. It had no mouth. It just had tired, tired eyes.
The ORIA had reclaimed him. But he was not going to be sent home. He was one of the others. He was a thing to be weaponised, and on the faded heights, launched from the spirit-cannon into the enemy's maw.
He was nothing now. All that he was was burnt as fuel. There was not enough of him left to remember the night before, and all was blank before his mind - except the knowledge that he had done as was required. That what needed to be done was done, even if he never knew it.
It is spring. Farhad looks up at the moon, leaning on his cane, watching the lights of Tehran below. It won't be so long, now.