The Museum of Doubt Read online

  Lately the Mesopotamian gods had fallen behind. The forward-looking gods had transformed themselves into committees, more subtle and powerful than traditional deities, since their servants, clients and enemies believed the gods were the sums of their human parts, and failed to notice when they began speaking of beings which had no tangible existence: Nato, the god of war, Imf, the god of money, Wto, the god of trade. The Mesopotamians had made feeble attempts in that direction with Inanna, the Iraqi National Non-Nuclear Association, and Enki, some kind of crappy import-export group, but they understood they’d left it too late to gain their old preeminence. They needed a different strategy. They would return to the dead, but this time they would persuade the dead to sue. It would be a class action against world governments and the ruler of the underworld, Ereshkigal, for negligence and abuse of civil rights in failing to give the dead the opportunity to live. Relatives of the dead went to law every day, but, if the dead themselves would testify en masse, it would give the Mesopotamian gods leverage. Mak savoured the concept: Inanna and Enki would maul Ereshkigal so badly in the courts that she’d be forced to quit the underworld and let them take over.

  And what do the dead get if they win? said Mak.

  We sell it to the dead that they get life, said Enki. When we win, we persuade them to settle for something less. I don’t know. Stock in a floated underworld. Mineral rights.

  They discussed jurisdiction. Enki wanted the suit to go ahead in a US court. Mak was doubtful. Enki dropped a lot of articles and after a while Mak realised that he saw the US as Us, a god in its own right. He asked Enki what Us was god of.

  The god of normal people, said Enki. Like in that hymn by David Byrne. People Like Us.

  Mak looked out at the city to anchor himself. It wasn’t the best of anchors and when he tried looking over the edge of the roof garden he saw the ants getting in and out of taxis forty stories below and that didn’t do much for his sense of unbelief either. He swallowed and told Enki he’d love to represent him and Inanna. He’d love to count Enki as a friend. (He hadn’t intended to say that.) But as an aetheist, he couldn’t in all conscience take on a client on the basis that the client was divine.

  Enki said: You want proof, I suppose.

  It’s OK, said Mak, afraid his interlocutor was going to jump off the roof.

  You don’t think I’m a god. You want me to strike someone down with lightning, or change that flower tub into a serpent.

  I guess. Or conjure up a million bucks in cash for the case.

  I can’t do that, Maurice, said Enki. Everything needs time. You meet a neurosurgeon at a party, he doesn’t have to slice off the top of your wife’s cranium with a butterknife to prove he is who he says he is. Look. What I’ll do. You’re only a mortal, but I’ll give you a ride up and show you the way it is where the gods are.

  And Enki led Maurice back into the party. The mayor was there, and the state governor, and a dozen celebrities, singers and actors. Charming as he was, a minor former celeb in his own right, Maurice didn’t know them. And Enki led Maurice into their circles, and spoke to the stars in such language that they took Maurice as a friend, invited him to their homes, gave him their numbers, offered to share their cocaine with him. When they began writing him cheques, Maurice looked at Enki in fear and wonder and shook his head. Enki smiled. Maurice looked at the movie actress who was trying to persuade him to join her birthday party on a private island, turned to Enki and, pursing his lips, he shrugged and nodded.

  One cold ragged sunrise a few days later Mak was at an airfield in New Jersey, boarding a Gulfstream. Enki said he’d borrowed it from Iata, a god of flight. Mak asked where they were going. Enki said they were going to take depositions. Mak asked what he should wear. Enki said he should wear gold. Mak took a Rolex and his wedding ring and packed lightweight suits, shirts and a cashmere sweater. The dawn wind cut through Mak’s raincoat when he got out of the limo and stood at the bottom of the steps with Enki.

  Don’t become her slave, said Enki. We didn’t hire you for that. She has plenty.

  The door slid out and open and they entered the plane. They joined Inanna in the lounge for takeoff.

  Mak was a lawyer, one of the best. He knew as well as anyone how to use the spoken word to make those who were listening see what he wanted them to see. When he spoke he didn’t stutter or mutter or forget what he was going to say. He didn’t um and ah. He always finished his sentences. He didn’t nest parentheses inside his speeches as new thoughts occurred to him. He had a craftsman’s love of a well-turned lie. He knew all the tricks of rhetoric, from Plato to Stalin, and all the music of human emotion. He saw the flaws and weaknesses of the powerful and knew how to coax flames of pity in a jury from the meanest tinder. But he became incoherent when he tried to describe Inanna.

  She was dark, with deep black eyes, and looked in her mid-twenties. From the moment she took the tongue and clasp of the seatbelt in her long hands, pressed them together over her belly, looked at Mak and smiled, he forgot Enki’s advice and became her slave. Nothing else he said about her made sense. He said she was in jeans torn at the knee and a cheap synthetic fleece, and then it was something like a dress-shaped cobweb made of fine gold chain, which made her body shimmer in lines like a city seen from the air at night, and then he had the three of them naked, playing poker for pennies, but the next moment denied that they’d taken their clothes off, ever. There was a layer of heat around her, Mak said, which you could feel when she was close to you. When she spoke she looked into his eyes and her words flew to the things she talked about as if the word and the thing were the same. When she stopped speaking and looked away it was like a death, like a final parting, and he wanted to follow, crawl into her thoughts and wrap himself in them, but couldn’t.

  They flew eastward all day and dived into the night rushing west. Mak and Inanna played backgammon for points, using little human figures of baked clay which Inanna dug out of a hemp sack by handfuls. She said she was sorry for the way the Babylonians had treated his people two and a half thousand years before. Mak, child of grocers and grandchild of Bolsheviks, wasn’t sure what she meant and accepted the apology. Inanna complimented him for keeping in shape. It was purification, she said, an honour to Aba, the American god of law.

  Mak asked Inanna what the afterlife was like. Inanna said it was like low tide on the beach without the sea, the sky or the beach. That bitch Ereshkigal hung me on a hook to die, she said. Enki sent people down for me.

  Why? said Mak, filled with violent envy towards Enki.

  They didn’t want to let me go. You’ll be all right, though. You’re a lawyer. You’ll talk your way out.

  A steward in a white kaftan brought chicken and rice and wine. They ate and lay down on reclining seats to sleep. The cabin lights went out. Mak lay awake for a long time, listening to the dull keening of the engines, watching the stars. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass of the porthole to look down at cities’ and ships’ lights. He heard Inanna singing and his guts twisted so fiercely for love that he almost shouted out. The plane dipped and rose in gentle turbulence and somewhere aft he heard a goat bleating.

  When he woke, Enki and Inanna were dressed in gold, eating muesli and drinking orange juice.

  Inanna asked him if he wanted to play dice, for stakes. Mak said yes.

  There’s no time, said Enki. He pointed out of the window. Two F-18 fighters were flying alongside them in the clear blue. The land below was brown and crinkled.

  Mak asked where they were.

  Mesopotamia, said Enki. Those are Us planes. They show us the way.

  Mak had put geography to one side as a child but didn’t want to say he didn’t know where Mesopotamia was. He figured it was somewhere in the Balkans.

  Mesopotamia, said Enki. The English speakers have taken to calling it Iraq.

  Isn’t that where they have like a no-fly zone?

  Enki does some business for Pentagon, warlord of Us, said Enki. Here, belt up. />
  The jets banked, one after the other, and dived down. The Gulfstream followed. The goat bleated.

  Is there a goat on board? said Mak.

  Don’t worry, said Enki. It’s tethered. Let’s have some tequila. He opened a door on the surface of the table that was fixed within arm’s reach of them all and took out three silver cylinders, smoking with frost. They unscrewed in the middle. In one half was the drink, in the other a pile of peeled lime segments thickly encrusted with salt crystals. When Inanna took hers she placed the two containers in brackets next to her seat to leave her hands free. She was pushing the buttons of a Nintendo console.

  The F-18s had levelled out. Look, said Enki, and they saw green bombs unlatch from the fighters’ wings and drift, rocking, towards the ground. Spears of flame roared from the fighters’ engines and they shot away. The Gulfstream was following in the direction of the bombs. The aircraft went into a steep dive and banked round in a tight circle. A river ran through the brown land. Twisted in a knot at a bend in the river was a city.

  You’ll enjoy this, said Enki.

  The tight turn pressed them into their seats. The plane straightened, still diving, and for a moment the weightless salted limes began creeping into the air. The Gulf-stream levelled out a few score feet above the ground. They were flying over the shacks and weedgrown lots and allotments on the margins of the city. At their speed the passing streets and buildings were a clanjamfrie of fragmented details, a door, a dog, a white car skidding off the road in a U-turn, an old man looking up, two running women, a donkey, a line of palms, a gun on a rooftop poking out from sandbags, a row of posters of Saddam Hussein, a grove of drying washing, a neat green plot of maize in the garden of a neat red-roofed bungalow. The air and light changed, a brightness bloomed on either side, fading to the chaos of unripe fire, and the plane shook, every joint creaking, fuselage bumping and scraping the shock waves as the bombs realised their design. Inanna and Enki called out a word in a language unknown to Mak, drained their tequilas and tossed pieces of lime on to their tongues. Mak did as they did. The jet banked again, climbing, and they could see the heaps of broken stone and cloven husks of concrete fuming where buildings had been.

  Yeah, the wrath of Us is really something, said Enki.

  Maurice, I’m sorry, that wasn’t good, said Inanna. Sometimes they can be so accurate. Shall we try another one?

  It’s time to land, Inanna, said Enki.

  Were there people down there? said Mak.

  Yes, said Inanna. People drop the bombs on people. But remember we aren’t people, Maurice. We’re gods. One of the things about being a god is that we don’t care about what happens to people unless we need them.

  I––

  Another of the things about being a god, Maurice, is that we get bored quickly.

  I’m not a god, said Mak.

  Hey, Maurice, lighten up, said Enki. You’re more than just people to us. We’ve got a contract, haven’t we? Have another tequila.

  It was a time of new awareness for Mak. He understood that those he was sharing a plane with partook of the law but were not bound by it. He understood that he had met gods before. In his corporate law days he had defended them and sued them and knew them by the fact that, when they lost a case, no matter how grievously, it left no mark on them. And he understood that no matter what Inanna did, he would love her.

  They landed just before sunset on an airfield outside the city. The Gulfstream taxied to a round tarmac stand at the opposite end of the airfield from the jagged ruin of a control tower and a row of hangars. Where the line of tarmac ended, cracked, sunbaked clay began, studded with clumps of dry thorn. A few yards from the stand was a bomb crater, furiously green with weeds around a puddle of muddy water at the bottom.

  They waited in the plane with the engines running while the steward set up an awning outside, with armchairs, a table covered in a white tablecloth and a brazier. He hammered a peg into the ground, carried the goat down the steps, tethered it and placed a wicker basket of straw and carrots at its feet. Mak and the gods changed into jeans, boots and sweaters and deplaned into the cooling evening. The engines stopped. They sat under the awning without speaking, drinking mint tea. The coals in the brazier crackled and a breeze began to blow. Summer lightning flashed on the horizon. Mak had many questions but after mentioning the fate of people he dared not speak again.

  A car approached. They heard it coming before they saw it in the darkness. It had no lights. It was a pick-up truck. It was travelling too fast in low gear and weaving from side to side. It turned sharp in front of the jet and slid to a standstill.

  Enki supplies Saddam with a few things he couldn’t get any other way, said Enki.

  Inanna walked to the truck and opened the driver’s door. Mak loved the way she moved: the strength of her arm, and the grace of her stride. She pulled an injured boy out from behind the wheel and carried him back to the awning. His thigh had been slashed by shrapnel, not deeply. She laid him down on a rug, put a silk cushion under his head and washed and dressed his wounds, murmuring to him and stroking his forehead. After he was bandaged and given water, Inanna and Enki helped him to his feet and took him to the back of the pick-up, where a tarpaulin was lashed over a heap of something. Enki threw back the tarpaulin and there was a murmured conversation. Enki called Mak over and shone a flashlight on to the truck’s cargo. There were seven blood-caked and dusty corpses, neatly stacked like logs, heads to the rear, although one didn’t have much of a head to speak of. Mak put his hand to his mouth and stroked his chin. There were five men in military uniform and two women, one an old woman in black and the other younger, in a blue polka dot dress and what had once been a white headscarf. There wasn’t a mark on her that they could see.

  That’s the boy’s mother, said Enki. Remember her face. Her name’s Najla. It means beautiful eyes. You may see her in the afterlife. I don’t know. Look out for her, and call her by name. She should be easier to engage than the rest. Tell her her son’s OK. Tell her she should sue. Get her to sign an affidavit.

  Was this the bombs? said Mak.

  Sure. The wrath of Us.

  Maurice, said Inanna, you have to go now. We’ll wait for you here. Are you ready? She put her hand on the back of his neck and pulled his head towards hers for a kiss. Are you ready? she said.

  Yeah, said Mak.

  They gave him an oilskin coat and a pack with a bottle of water, a knife, a coil of rope and a bundle of yellow legal pads. Inanna gave him something the size, shape and weight of a cereal bar, wrapped in gold leaf, to be eaten in dire extremity. Enki showed him how to slaughter the goat, handed him the leash and patted him on the shoulder. Mak walked off the tarmac and on to the clay.

  After a few minutes he looked over his shoulder. The light of the brazier was almost invisible. There was no moon and thickening clouds smothered the stars. On the horizon the shimmering sheet lightning crystallised into forks and he heard thunder. The goat bleated, though it trotted along willingly enough behind him. He walked on. He heard a cry like that of a seabird, only deeper, and a booming like surf. It was utterly dark, save for the lightning, which when it discharged showed a perfectly flat plain, the dry clay veined with fine cracks. His feet and the goat’s hooves left no trace. For hours he walked without seeing anything except lightning and without hearing anything except thunder and the pattering of boots and hooves on the clay.

  His free hand knocked into something hard. He stopped and felt the obstacle. It was wood, planks nailed together, like the hull of a boat. By the next lightning he saw it, an unvarnished, unpainted boat lying on its shallow keel, with a single bench inside and no oars. He walked around it and moved on. As he walked subsequent flashes showed more boats, of similar size, dotted across the plain, some upright, some keel-up, some smashed.

  It began to rain. In seconds the ground was covered with a thin, frictionless layer of mud, and Mak fell on his face, losing hold of the goat’s leash. He got to his knees and waved his
arms blindly in front of him, seeking the rope. He found the animal by its bleating and wrapped the rope twice around his hand. The rain fell in sheets and Mak felt his feet sinking into the ground. He tried to walk forward. Each time he lifted his boot it became heavier as more mud stuck to it. It took him five minutes to walk twenty yards. By that time the mud was almost coming over the top of his boots and it was becoming harder to drag the goat along with him. The lightning gave just enough light through the rain to see the nearest boat. Mak took the goat leash in his teeth, unlaced his boots, tied them together and hung them round his neck. With the leash in one hand and his filthy sodden socks in the other he waded for the boat, crawling the last few yards, almost swimming, and climbed into it. He hauled the goat up by the collar and sat on the bench.

  The rain stopped, and the thunder and lightning, and a crescent moon rose. Mak looked over the side of the boat. The mud still glistened, but it was drying out. He waited. The moonlight showed the flat plain to the horizon, and hundreds of boats. Again, he heard the booming sound, but this time it didn’t fade, it strengthened to a continuous rumble, growing louder. Mak saw one horizon shiver, flex and grow, as if the world was curling up at one edge. When the rumble reached a certain intensity, and the sound was overlain by hissing, and the edge of the world grew to a certain height, and Mak could see not only the twisting crest of what was approaching but the white clouds lining its foremost rim, he dropped the goat’s leash and stood up. The wall of water came on, a dark streaked swell rising to four, five, six storeys, and as it ate the boats between it and Mak, its smoothness was as terrible as its roar. Mak’s legs gave way with awe and dread and he fell, clutching the struggling goat, pressing his face into its warm hide. Inanna, he said, and the wave hit the boat square on the stern, driving it forward, then pitching it over and hammering it into the mud like a nail.