Free Fire in the Unnameable Country by Ghalib Islam Page A

one was Niramish, because, as he explained, the strap would ruin his ermine cape.
    One knows/one does not know/one cannot believe: all these contradictions flowed seamlessly through me as my friend drifted into an irretrievable loneliness. I awoke one night after having fallen headdown asleep on the coldmetal table of the garage where Niramish worked and could not see him anywhere.
    I yelled his name and he returned loudly, I’m here, from two or three feet away, but I couldn’t see him. I blinked-unblinked, called him again, and then his image flickered and readjusted to the reality of that dust-invaded space.
    He shook me by my shoulders, held me aloft half as well as my father did once to rid me of the habit of presiding as heresiarch over an imaginary kingdom. Then he became fully visible.
    After that incident, Niramish fashioned a pair of glasses for me because he said I was losing my sight, but their purpose was quite theopposite, for Niramish understood my gift-curse of insight and wanted to prevent me from seeing deeper. The glasses seemed altogether ordinary but they disallowed me from understanding any more than the average person when I put them on. It was a kindly gesture to protect his friend from a reality to which he had already adjusted. It was a nervous, selfish act for which I never forgave him.

    What do you believe. Did Niramish and others like him whistle into the abyss to draw out an angry God. Know this: at that time the politics of the country—the banshee competitions of throatskill orchestrated by the gourmandizing Maxwell of the Reagan administration which resulted in the election of our head of state, or the back-and-forth braying by the mullahs, who traded insults after Friday prayers—failed utterly to synchronize with the spirit of the youth. In fact, we laughed at them all and recalled the theatre of the cows on the minarets as staged by the Americans, though some of us, like Hedayat, were not born when that incident occurred.
    No, we could not love the Americans because they had imprisoned us with mirror-streets and spied on us with everywhere cameras of a counterfeit movie set; they had burned us with a deceptive phosphorescent fire, which resisted water, and had deprived us of the ability to earn an honest living and driven us to hidden organs of income. But we loved the symbol nevertheless: which politician, secular religious pseudo-socialist, or whateverelse, was not a dumb roan bull at the pulpit’s height. What was politics if not the moocall to assembly at an odd time in the sun’s route across the firmament.
    No; understand: whoever committed themselves to combustible politics in those days did so strictly for money, which could not be earned another way, or for some inexplicable personal reason. Ah, if not politicsthen surely the monetary; yet know Niramish destroyed our hashish networks and did irreparable damage to our connections with dealers of snow, as well as all manner of opiates, when he decided to switch professions. At that time, we were making enough to purchase dozens of ermine capes, and I have already told of his aversion to accepting remunerations for his electrical work. Saint Niramish then, ascetic sadhu dervish Jesuit ideologue and knee-bending prayerer, you do snide, is this.
    Yet my responsibility is not to convince you of another emotion but to relate the life of my friend as he lived it. If you must know, a large reason behind his metamorphosis into the Electrician lay in the thrill of craftsmanship. It is difficult to describe the energy that radiated from his body as he disassembled an alarm clock with only four fingers and a thumb, let alone when rewiring a complex circuitboard. But to return to the story, who betrayed Niramish and what was the cause of his death. I could not confirm how they did it until years later, but it was obvious that the failure and capture of the last bomber, incidentally also named Hedayat—widely reported