Final Winter

The sun had crawled higher up into the dusty yellow sky when in one of the narrow, unmarked side streets there had been the sign, in bright letters on a square piece of plastic. He looked down at the words laboriously written out in English on the paper, and matched them, letter for letter, with the overhead sign.

LAHORE NUMBER ONE INTERNET CAFE.

He murmured a prayer, thanks to be God, there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet, and he went to the place.

~ * ~

The glass and metal door closed behind him, and Amil started shivering, both in fear and from the intense cold inside the place. He had never seen anything like it in his life. There were tables and booths and chairs, and while tea and coffee and pastries and other items were being consumed, at each table there were computers and computer screens, lined up, row after row. He took in the sight, jaw agape, at the men (and women!) sitting before the computers. A young man came over to him, frowning, wearing the foreign costume of a white shirt and necktie, and blue jeans, and said in a sharp voice, ‘Yes?’

‘I… I wish to rent a computer.’

The man sneered at him. ‘You have the money?’

Amil fumbled in his robe, took out the American money, which he passed over to the man who grunted, held it up to the light, felt it with his fingers, and nodded, walking back to a counter. Amil followed and the man, with some papers and a small black object in his hand, said, ‘All right, then, you can—’

Amil blushed with shame, remembered his instructions. ‘I… must have a computer with a drive… a disk drive.’

The man shook his head. ‘Very well. Come with me.’

Amil followed the man to one end of the place — a cafe, such an odd name — and he felt himself recoil as he saw two Western women — dressed like whores in T-shirts and shorts, their knapsacks resting against their booted feet — giggling and whispering to each other as they examined a shared computer screen.

They came to an empty booth in the corner, and Amil saw crumpled-up papers and napkins littering the floor and the table where the computer was, but the man made no attempt to clean it up. Amil sat down and the man presented a paper to him and said some long sentences that he had a hard time understanding, but even this had been part of his training. He just nodded and scrawled his signature at the bottom of the paper. The man took the paper away and put the small black object on top of the computer. It was a timer, with blood-red numerals, and it was set at 60, and as Amil watched it switched to 59.

The manager sneered again. ‘Do you need any help, boy? If so, that will cost you more.’

Amil shook his head, now feeling anger at how the man was humiliating him. ‘No, I do not need your help. I am quite able to do what must be done.’

The manager laughed. ‘Maybe so, but it will be your fault if you do something wrong over the next hour. Not mine. The time is paid for. Not anything else.’

Amil watched as the man walked away, and when Amil felt like he was no longer being observed he went to work.

~ * ~

From his inside pocket again, Amil took out his directions, put the paper down next to the keyboard, smoothed it out. With fingers now seeming as thick as tree, trunks, he started tapping at the keyboard, following the directions, feeling the twisted feeling in his guts ease away as the Sudanese’s directions worked with no difficulty, as he set up the computer to do what had to be done. He remembered, during one of the sessions, asking the Sudanese why he was being sent to do what seemed to be a simple task, and the Sudanese had replied, ‘Some of us are well known. We need to stay in the villages, in the forests, in the mountains. A young man such as yourself… with no history, no record, he can do much.’

And of course, that had made much sense.

There. It was time.

He took out the black rectangular piece of plastic, remembered what the Sudanese had called it. A disk. But weren’t disks round? And this one was square! And was it true what the Sudanese had said, that so much information, so many words — and even pictures! — could be stored on such a thing?

He looked around the computer, found the slot that the disk went in, and inserted it. And as the Sudanese had predicted, there was a humming and a clicking noise, and when that noise ended, Amil continued, his fingers no longer seeming so thick and awkward.

On the screen something was now displayed and, reading with some difficulty, he saw that, again, the Sudanese was telling the truth. There were little cartoons on the screen, each with a number, from one to twenty, and the Sudanese had said that each little cartoon meant a photograph. And Amil had said, what kind of photographs? And the Sudanese had said, ‘Of flowers. Trees. Mountains.’

Amil had been disappointed. Pictures? That was all he had to do? Send pictures to some other computer in some other part of the world?