The Last Rectangle Read online

  Pain approached as a color. It was yellow and centerless. Now it spread in a circle of diffuse pulsation. A sharp blue pain pierced his midst as hot water from a hose thrust into his mouth swelled his chest to bursting.

  As his head jerked, it was repositioned by unfriendly fingernails dug into his temples. As the water seared through his throat, shocks, heat, brilliance, techniques beyond his waking reason intermingled with isolated nonsense, screams, jolts and jerks. The incessant stream again became a colorless noise, killing his memory, neutralizing his expectations. His was cleansed. In a while, his death or his incarceration would leave them with empty hands. This was no revenge on his own part, nor escape.

  As the law pressured him to take sides with or against truth, he would then maneuver to remain in the only area where law was sterile and his own unassailable.

  Interrogation 2

  It is early in the evening. The sky is changing its colors. Soon, sounds and smells will also change. Cortez sits in a tent charting a letter to King Charles in Spain. His aide mixes the ink and searches for the seal. Cortez lifts his head in thought, in time to hear a bustle outside his tent. Soon the dust enters followed by four of his soldiers grabbing an Aztec by the arms. It is a strange kind of resistance the Aztec is putting up. It is clear he is not trying to physically delay the soldier’s attempt to lead him to Cortez. Yet, he has that look that forces the soldiers to push him forwards towards Cortez.

  Cortez knows that look. He has seen Aztecs walk. Their faces betray their knowledge of their fate in his hands. This one exudes a deeply set defiance laced with indifference. Cortez motions to the soldiers to let the Aztec stand free. They do and he does not change position. He stares fixedly at Cortez. There is a long silence in which both men look at one another.

  A soldier explains the incident. The guards on duty caught the Aztec trying to sneak into the Spanish camp. The soldier repeats the questions they asked the Aztec. The soldier thinks it significant to insist that the Aztec was spoken to in Nahuatl, his native language. He was asked many questions and he did not answer the guards, he says.

  Cortez nods his head to the soldier who cuts his story short. One more soldier ventures to speak but gets halted by a determined stare from Cortez. Cortez looks at the Aztec. He waits. The Aztec looks on and does not move. The quill is still in Cortez’s hand. Cortez takes a deep breath and slowly composes his interrogation. Where does the Aztec come from, he asks? Who is his chief? Why is it that the Aztec chose this camp and not that of the neighboring Aztecs who are assisting Cortez in his conquest? He asks why is it that the Aztec came so close to the camp knowing that he might be caught. All this Cortez asks in Spanish. Following that, the soldiers translate it into Nahuatl. Still the Aztec gives that fixed stare.

  Cortez feels a faint flush rise to his face and a cold sweat on his back. He stands up, the quill still in his hand. He approaches and answers the Aztec’s stare with an equally fixed look. The Aztec does not move. Cortez knows that his blush is conspicuous. He talks. He delivers a long invective. He promises torture. He intimates that he knows who the Aztec is. Cortez talks. Cortez forms his best arguments to entice the Aztec to speak. The Aztec stands still.

  Cortez feels the blood bursting at the tip of every pore in his face. He grits his teeth while speaking and accuses. He raises his arms towards the heaven above and invokes God’s retribution to the Aztec. The Aztec remains silent, always staring Cortez in the eyes. The soldiers look on. They are ordered by Cortez to take the Aztec away and keep him without food and water. They do. Cortez returns to his letter. The ink is dry. He is dry. This encounter cost him a lot. Cortez throws away the letter to his King. He lies on his blankets quietly.

  For two nights Cortez hears the voice of the Aztec slowly answering, the Aztec who did not speak. He wakes up in the morning with a mind more feverish than ever.

  His trips around the camp during the day busy him from his fixation to make the man talk. Soldiers all around relax, prepare for their next march, repair clothes, gamble and sing. Cortez is in Mexico, the soldiers are in Spain. Cortez walks.

  In the distant end of the camp is the tent with the Aztec. It is guarded by 3 soldiers. Cortez walks in and sees the Aztec squatting on the ground. His face is not visible. Cortez stares at him. No word is said by either. Cortez leaves. He walks back to his tent. His step is light. He does not want to speak. He squats in his tent in an unusual spot.

  The soldiers come to the tent of Cortez with his food but he does not touch it. He sends it to the Aztec.

  Evening comes. Soldiers prepare for a small celebration, a tableau. Cortez is escorted by 3 soldiers. He passes in front of the Aztec’s tent. The Aztec is squatting. The food next to him is untouched. Cortez beckons to the Aztec to accompany him. They walk side by side. Cortez is seated in the center of the crowd, the Aztec next to him. In the middle of the singing and with no resistance from anyone, the Aztec stands up and walks away, leaving the camp. Cortez drops his head into his palms in despair.

  The Biology Teacher

  Hani taught biology and he taught it well but he never saw himself as a teacher. Although teaching did not become him, biology did. He lived it like a dream and a song, in every step of his day. He enjoyed seeing himself as the current rung of a long and complex ladder of evolution swimming in a large world of interacting organisms whose links with one another may one day be rigorously represented by chemical equations on paper. The delicate balance between certainties and randomness thrilled him. It started from the bottom with the uncertainties of the subatomic world. It climbed up to the determinism of molecular chemistry, upwards again to the random operations of genetics. Was it not a random event that caused that particular pair of his parents’ gametes to meet one another and result in a particular bonding of his DNA generally responsible for what he was today? He was never too far from biological play when he was alone. He toyed with seeing himself as he actually was: a myriad set of molecules interacting with one another in that massive silence. He could not but feel empty when one day he demonstrated the relation between the sizes of protons, neutrons and electrons in an atom and the distances between them. He scaled up the space between those particles to the size of a large football field. Electrons the size of tennis balls flew around the edge of that field while neutrons and protons the size of footballs bubbled in the center of the field. This meant that we were essentially made up of empty space with a few lumps of matter here and there. The emptiness felt larger as he explained to his class that these subatomic particles were not particles at all but mathematical probability curves representing the likelihood that these particles were somewhere at some time and not somewhere else.

  Wherever he went, biology was in his thoughts and fundamentally so. It was the basso continuo of his life, or to use the jazz term, the bass line. He loved jazz and could kill for it. That base line was not constant, though. He always enjoyed turning the biological visions inside out like an improvisation. One day, he sat in a smoky restaurant where a quintet played passionate jazz. Along with the piano, bass and drums, there was an alto sax and a trombone. The group played there every Monday and Hani was always on hand to hear them. He first got to know them during his university days and loved their music well. At that time, they used to play traditional jazz which they grew out of. On their various musical development and singly, they became more disciplined musicians with larger bands. Later on, when they reteamed and started playing in clubs, they went through different mimetic periods. During one season, they would find themselves immersed in the music of some maestro, Charlie Parker or Milt Jackson but they would then drop the style fast and move forward into another style, often one that was a descendant of it. In this manner, they acquired a thorough knowledge of jazz from all periods but they never played earlier periods in public. What they had reached was a very rugged style. It preserved a natal and earthly black sound which faintly related to white structures. It was difficult t
o place them in a period but not because of a lack of identity. Colors of particular renditions changed to become specific performances. Hani never needed to place them as their music was natural to him. A very endearing thing about them was to see their intensity suddenly bloom in a group smile as they caught one of them throwing everybody out of balance by a mangled quotation or an affectionate parody of one of the greats. Chunks of foreign material floated in and out of their phrasing without being foreign. On one of those evenings Hani sipped his gin and tonic full of ice and constructed the Grand Unified Theory of jazz and biology. As he nudged the ice cubes downwards in his glass with his tongue, evolution bubbled up. He thought of evolution operating in two separate modes: the phylogenetic and ontogenetic modes. Phylogenetic evolution was the commonly known Darwinian evolution that operated throughout the ages on whole species of animals and plants. Nature destroyed those individuals that had specific traits which made them incapable of surviving. When such individuals died, others were left that did not have such traits resulting in the purification of the genetic code for that particular species and hence its survival in the coming generations. But how did these traits originate?

  In each generation, two things happened and they happened by chance: due to the random combination of the genes of the parents, the newborn was handed over a new set of codes that provided it with new traits which were different from those of its parents but near enough to them. Also, as the genetic code was transmitted from one generation to the next and possibly because its molecular complexity caused some of its structures to become unstable, parts of the code often changed, broke down, naturally but chaotically through a process called mutation. Again, the newborn would have new codes that were almost the same as those of its parents but radically different in some specific places due to these random mutations. So with time and as new traits appeared through such combinations and mutations, those individuals that had more suitable traits for a particular environment survived and were better adapted to live their life and produce further offspring. To say “adapted” is slightly irresponsible here. It would be better to say “less likely” to get extinct. Hani never mistook this process with any grand design by nature or God to produce better individuals. This was no utopic vision nor was it a self willed wish to adapt. It was an operation that was sweet and sour. As new species arose, others disappeared. The process took place between chance on the one hand and the severely structured logic of the genetic code on the other. So as the black slaves went to work in the fields of the Europeans, they took with them codes from Africa which they merged with basic melody lines the Europeans had remembered. Now you has Jazz! The East African pentatonic scale blossomed in the plains of the South and slowly turned into blue notes. The relaxed square melodies of renaissance mid Europe mostly designed over a time frame of 4 4 8 bars of fully resolved music, could not retain that luxury and lost 4 bars resulting in a 12 bar form that was always missing something, a scent from far away, a need to return home and yet another attempt at a resolution. Along with the mutated pentatonic, blues were born, a new species. As the code or the idiom of that generation spread from the fields through to the large towns, some of the codes over lived their purpose. They disappeared as worn out styles. Others were transmuted into new idioms. Music streamed from well-written scores: gentlemanly rhythms and lady like love songs. White folks helped the process by enlarging the bands ensuring safety in number. These big bands roamed the jungle of the cities uninterrupted by the war. Their music filled the air waves dominated by the white man. African codes lay dormant but not for long. In a dark club soon after the war, or in many of them, poor black musicians not socially fit to be part of big bands nor were they capable of adapting to the tight white jackets and assigned solos required of them, stood up all night playing music whose idioms had mutated from earlier periods. Gone was the steady drum beat, to be replaced by syncopation. Even the bass drum, long associated with black jungle rhythms from a previous species that died too to be replaced by sparkling cymbals. Scores? Not on your life. Jazz was passionate again and it was black. What were thought to be recessive features, turned out to be dominant and new features won the day from old features by a successful combination of randomness and inheritance. Hani ordered another drink as he singled out vestiges and new characteristics of jazz in each generation until he reached the 70’s which were linked in his mind with a personal experience. By that time, jazz had mutated so violently and so far that there was a pattern-less rambling in the codes transmitted to that generation well proved by the pianist of Charles Mingus. In a performance in Baalbeck, he swept his hands over the keyboard as if he were wearing gloves. Jazz was going in circles. They called it free jazz but the truth of the matter was that jazz musicians were bound to nothing and they were bound to it so hard, that they had lost all their freedom. The giants could not survive. They had nothing to eat. And since all their idioms had broken down, they could not procreate. Soon, side species long forgotten saw the open environment around them and without giants to compete with, shook the dust off years of neglected codes and revived them. It was like some mad scientist germinating a species today whose genes he found solidified in resin a 100 million years old. A fusion resulted of idioms that were not new. Cross breeding emerged: Latin with African, Classical with Indian but always staying within the same well tested idioms and codes. Mutation and chance ceased to operate. A stability in the species resulted awaiting major mutations or external events to swing it into the next era. Hani was no longer paying attention to the music, a behavior he hated since his friends frequently looked at him when they played.

  Phylogenetic evolution was easier to handle than ontogenetic evolution since it dealt with species as a whole, large eras of jazz that Hani knew so well. He knew their characteristics, their starts and ends, the socio economic changes that germinated them leading to the formation of new species. Not in all cases were the causes so widely environmental. Broad species were known to result from single mutations that led to unique individuals and sounds that made them look like they came out of nowhere.

  And while on the track of individuals, Hani started going over ontogenetic evolution which was restricted to the period from fertilization to birth. It did not apply to whole species as phylogenetic evolution did but to single individuals. The fetus developed in a marvelous way following the master code dictated by the genes in its cells. Though this was a master code, it was far from a single minded program.

  There were a lot of stops and starts. Traits would appear in the fetus that belonged to species very different from its own, species with which it had a common inheritance, millions of years earlier. At one time, the human fetus would look like that of a pig or a horse, probably activating a chunk of code left over from the time when we shared a common predecessor with pigs or horses. Large blocks of code were left in the genes from such earlier periods, blind alleys that the master code went through executing their built in instructions only to find at the end of the program some genetic stop sign that said, no, go back, this is not part of your growth. At another stage, the human fetus would develop a small tail which would grow but would suddenly shrink back and remain a vestige, our coccyx. Very early in its growth, the fetus develops gills identical to those on fish. In one or two weeks, the gills would disappear and get transformed into our Eustachian tubes linking the upper part of our mouth to the ear domain. In a short period of nine months, ontogenetic evolution would copy the steps of phylogenetic evolution that took place over hundreds of millions of years. So this individual looked like it was trying traits and features that belonged to earlier species or periods only to throw them out as it went for its own end: the birth of a new individual, a proud example of its species, but a new example, though only an example.

  Hani knew music well and played a few instruments but his favorite was the oboe which effectively shut him out of jazz. The oboe was never in the main stream of jazz instruments and was often regarded as an effe
minate stick in a music that often betrayed macho like development and choices. His friends on stage were in their last wind. He tried to hear a place for the oboe in their sound and was sure that it could be there and that he could be there too.

  It had caused him much anguish to know that despite such certainty now and before, he had never progressed in jazz beyond a few blind alleys, yet he knew it intimately and was able to repeat its idioms, recognizing them and even recomposing them in his head. If ontogenetic evolution was anything to go by, having gone into and out of all these alleys in jazz, Hani must be totally ready by now. Today he felt ready. He looked up once again and saw his friends taking their last bow. The customers were leaving but he felt a different kind of ending. He walked over to the stage and asked his friends if they were tired. They knew from his looks that he wished to play. One of them spoke the mind of the rest when he said: go and get your silly oboe while we take a break, but listen, we cannot play for more than one hour. Don’t worry, Hani said, this time it will hardly be fifteen minutes, but it will be.

  He was back in no time and was up and ready on the stage, licking his reed as his friends floated around picking up their instruments and turning off the sound system. This was going to be in real time, all of them facing each other with no audience.

  Hani blew a plaintive note, so long and shrill it froze the night in the smoky air of the club. Slowly the note put on weight and changed color as the four other instruments tried to find suitable notes to straddle it with. No drums yet. His four friends finally arrived at different notes which were linked by a blood red set of intervals they would be using over and over again throughout the piece. Later on one of them was to say that he had never heard this chord before.