Narcopolis

The poem, told in rhyming quatrains, was set in a future wasteland of war or famine or disease, where some unnamed catastrophe had culled much of the world’s population. To protect themselves against the invisible, nations had broken up into smaller states, each with its own government, religion, language and particular social customs. Travel between cities was insanely complicated and travel between states was banned by all governments. Citizens were required to carry passports with them at all times. Xavier’s poem concerned a rural Moroccan boy who falls sick while getting ready for school. His parents take him to a hospital in Fez and are told by the authorities that their son will not come out of his coma and further contact with him will only ensure their own decline or imprisonment, because they were out of their municipal precinct and had broken the law by coming to Fez, and were in fact continuing to break the law by remaining there. The parents are forced to abandon their son and return to their village, where the mother soon develops agoraphobia and the father becomes a systematic abuser of the female inmates in the small mental institution in which he works. The boy wakes up in a city he doesn’t know, alone in a room in the middle of the night, except it isn’t night at all, because a red light is streaming into the window. He thinks: I am dead, like Jed-di, like Ammi and Abba. Everyone died and I am in hell because of the bad things I did. He doesn’t know it but he has recovered. He continues to lie in bed, attached to a glucose drip and a monitor. Then he sees that the moonlight has become redder, so bright it seems the devil himself has come to pay him a visit. The boy walks to the window and sees the building is on fire. He runs down the endless corridors of the hospital, which, he soon understands, is deserted but for him. Then followed two quatrains of landscape description, the desert at night and in the early dawn, the necessity of finding drinking water, the portability and efficacy of dried fruits and honey, and the miraculous restorative powers of some varieties of cactus plants. When the poem returns to the boy, he is in his late teens. He is the leader of a band of rebel nomads, youths who travel by night and hide by day, living off the generosity of villagers. In the winter of the boy’s eighteenth year, he and his comrades come to a small town that the boy recognizes as his village, now grown into a place of some importance. From a hill the youths gaze at the sleeping town and the boy identifies the cemetery, the insane asylum where his father worked, the bakery and teashop, and so on, but try as he might he cannot locate his house. ‘Let’s go down and wander around,’ his closest comrade and second in command suggests. ‘We’ll wander around until it’s found, / Then we can rest.’ The boy does not reply. He realizes that the reason he could not identify his home is because the modest house in which he grew up is now a mansion with a pool and a garden and he can even see children’s toys scattered on the lawn. The group begins to descend into the valley when the boy changes his mind. They will skirt the town and travel on, he says. The poem ended with these lines:

It wasn’t that I wanted to go home,

Who knew home? I only knew alone.

What I wanted was to be elsewhere,

Somewhere, anywhere but there.

Xavier continued to talk, though he was no longer reading the poem. ‘I woke up to bright sunshine this morning,’ he said, ‘or it could have been yesterday morning, who’s to know? In any case, I woke to bright skies and I thought, for some of us it’s a beautiful day. I.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be a beautiful day for you? You come to India only to escape the winter. The papers say you are moving from the UK to the US, to become a citizen of a rich, or I should say richer, country. They say exile suits you.’

It was the small man at the back of the room who’d asked the earlier question. Iskai said it was still not yet question time and he asked the man to wait. Xavier said he had never claimed to be a citizen of exile. The word was much too grand and fashionable to describe his condition, which was something less dramatic and had to do with restlessness and chance. He said: It was never my intention to become a citizen of the United States. I am and will continue to be a first-class citizen of my own country rather than a second-class citizen of elsewhere. What I am doing is applying for the status of Alien of Extraordinary Ability. It’s a visa category I recommend for green-card aspirants.