All you can do is stay grappled to the book's planed planks, hoping that after each breaker, the timbers you've lashed to will bob back to the surface. The only recourse, when this morning slips loose, is to tie it to ten more verses. You listen in to the archangel Gabriel, dictating to the Prophet in his subterranean cave. This story extends itself only in hinted wisps, as if all readers already know the plot. But the more gloriously cryptic, the better. Each ten-verse maze holds you longer than the Sunday Times crossword ever did.
You search through the book, for a larger architecture, some forward motion that could pass for form. But the verses possess only the most astonishing organizing principle. The chapters proceed from longest to shortest, starting in prose and ending in prayer. Still, it swells, this staggering dialogue: God, His Prophet, and the cast of broken humanity, in a three-way game of telephone where only endless repetition forces the words to correspond with what they figure.
You lie in the Prophet's slime-laden cave, taking the complete dictation all over again. Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of the daybreak, from the evil of what He has created; and from the evil of the night when it cometh on; and from the evil of the blowers upon knots. Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men, from the evil of the whisperer, from jinns and men.
You do. You say what it says to say. Out loud. You recite your fatwahs and divinations for a live audience of the word-starved. Chapter and verse. Forward and back. No one comes to tell you to break off. Verily, man is in loss, save those who believe and do right, and bid each other be true, and bid each other be patient.
For a long time, talking to the book is conversation enough. Then the book runs out. You restart the careful system of mental tick marks from the top. But this time through, you already know what the surahs hold. And all those repeated commands to Say, Say at last force you to take the ideas live, into the realm of surprise, of real listeners.
You target the simplest, most religious of your keepers, the next time he lingers over a delivery. "Sayid, doesn't the Prophet say that you must never steal?"
"Yes." His only available answer. For lying, too, is forbidden.
"The man thief and the woman thief. Cut off the hands of both of them, as punishment, for they have done very wrong. An example from Allah, for Allah is mighty and wise."
You grope for the book, hold it out, open to the Table. He takes it from you, but of course hands the tainted, unreadable translation back to you at once.
"Yes, Mr. Taimur." As grave as the world at issue.
"But you have stolen me. You have stolen me from my life, and from my mother, and from my… family. This is the worst theft of all. How can you do what the Prophet has told you never to do?"
You hear the man crumble in silence. The surf of faith crashes against the rocks of duty. You curse yourself. But you are ready to do worse.
"Mr. Taimur, I cannot know. I ask Chef. Tomorrow. Inshallah."
As if you've asked for another haircut. He comes through two days later, to let you off the chain for your run. He says nothing. You wait until your half hour of exertion ends, and he replaces the iron ring on your ankle.
"Sayid, did you ask the Chief about… stealing?" You hold out your hands, the ones whose severing Allah specifies as punishment.
"Chef say not to talk to you. You think like a snake."
A snake and worse. A squid. A dung beetle. A human. A creature that would live at all costs.
"Sayid. Walter-jan. How much do your people pay you?"
He does not answer. However much he grasps the words, he does not understand you. You sense him fling his palms out, helpless.
"How much do you make? Twenty-five dollars a month? Thirty? You come work for me. I give you forty."
You cannot rouse him, even to anger. Getting him to kill you, for the moment, is past hope.
Deliverance almost comes, on the day you stop wishing for it. It begins one evening, during your thirty minutes of exertion off the chain. Gaunt legs work their oval until you find yourself logging a few hundred meters more than usual. You soak up a dozen bonus laps, exulting in this sudden increase in strength that leaves you able to shatter all previous speed records. But soon the laps so completely decimate your old personal best that something must be wrong.
You slow to a fast walk and take stock. Furtive reconnoitering near the door discloses nothing, no exceptional noises in the corridor beyond. The best explanation of this miracle is the most prosaic. Whoever was supposed to put you back on the leash tonight has forgotten his place in the rotation. The tick of the thirty-minute clock is finally silenced. Infinite freedom descends on you by accident, and leaves you no choice but to seize it.
You walk all night, a forced march through the checkpoints of crippling fatigue. You cannot squander this supreme windfall, not so long as life lays any claim to you. The epic trek leads off in the dark to parts foreign and unreachable. All those tucked-away peaks and archipelagos that you've never had the leisure to explore now stand naked. Liberty— a whole night in which to rub up against every degree of variegated plaster in the full three-sixty — unfolds with such grace that all bitterness at it having to end gives in to a larger awe.
All night long, wonder refuses to vanish. Unrestricted mobility. Crouching, cantering, contrapposto, tiptoe: all postures enter the available repertoire. North and South return, and East and West with them, dragging along every skew axis. Amazement, here in the pitch-black passages, is a tactile thing, feeling its way along the smooth-bore corridors into open defiles of feeling that you haven't allowed yourself since the earliest days of captivity.
With movement comes memory. A string of shuffle-ball-changes carries you back through a packed cocktail party of tongue-tied Japanese businessmen. Four hundred incredulous stutter-steps take you to the muddy crocus beds that your industrious girlfriend once caused to stud your lawn.
You lie down flat in the middle of this Grand Ballroom. You pry at the lip of your wall of sheet tin, searching for stretches that haven't been stapled down. You drop to the ground in front of the sliver under the door. Up close, through the slit of this science fair experiment, you can see the whole universe. The feet of your captors take turns on the watch, standing sentry over a suite of cells, cells that hold the lives of those taken along with you.
Hour by hour, the gift expands. You take possession of more room than you know what to do with. Free, at leisure, you pace back and forth across the gaping eight feet. You take up residence in the corner farthest from the radiator, pressing yourself against the far walls, sniffing their surface. Then disbelief shoves you on again, to more discovery. A strangeness spreads over you, one awful enough to seem the reason you were taken. Never again will you gainsay anything, or chafe against your allowed radius, or take a square inch for granted…
Daybreak's first covered strands are the cue to slip back to base camp. You lie waiting, acquiescent, on your bed of straw when breakfast arrives. They will see, in this harmless creature, how little need they have for the redundant lockdown.
But the sight of your freedom drives your guards insane. Bodies fly shouting through your room, enraged. Shadow puppets, through your blindfold, rush around in clumps, testing the lock, searching your clothes, slashing at your mattress with knives. How far do they think you could have gotten in your overnight excursion?
Voices lash at one another, spitting through their teeth like cornered rats. A feral, crazed face pulls yours up to it, its breath chamoising your cheeks. "How you do this? How you get out?"