Empire of Lies

24

With Nisreen waiting for him in the female visitors’ area of the hospital, Ramazan went in first, reprising his earlier-than-usual appearance of the day before. He had two procedures scheduled that morning, so he would need to be quick. He also knew that he’d need to be careful around the more senior staff, especially Fonseca. He’d already spent way more time than normal with his patient. And he’d need to keep his wits about him, despite having just endured a sleepless and mentally exhausting night.

The male ward was relatively quiet and thinly staffed. He went about his business casually, checking on a few patients and sharing a passing comment with a couple of the attendant nurses—then he saw Anbara heading toward him. Given the time, she had to be coming up to the end of her night shift. He bristled at the sight. He liked her, of course, but he didn’t want her there, now, a potential spoiler given her familiarity with his unusual patient.

“Sabahel nour,” he told her, smiling amiably as she drew near. “Quiet night for you, I hope?”

“Yes,” she replied. “For a change.”

“Good. How’s our”—he leaned in and lowered his voice with a wink—“special case?”

Anbara showed slight confusion before realizing what he meant. “Oh, our illustrious guest?” She blew out a small chuckle. “His excellency is sound asleep.” Her expression turned more serious. “I thought you might have concerns about him.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I hear you checked in on him several times yesterday.”

Ramazan tensed up but masked his nervousness. “No, it’s… I wanted to keep an eye on his drains, but everything looks fine. And, you know,” he added with a knowing, sarcastic look, “he is a bit special.”

Anbara nodded conspiringly. “That he is,” she said.

“I’ll bring him out and get him out of your way later, once I’m out of theater. I know you need the beds.” Changing the subject, he asked, “Are you done with your shift?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m looking forward to my bed.”

“You’ve earned it.”

He watched her walk off and checked his watch. The timing would be tight. He preferred to know Anbara was gone before he sneaked Nisreen in.

He loitered around, trying to remain inconspicuous, until he saw her leave. A few minutes later, with the ward on a quiet pause, he slipped out to find Nisreen and quickly ushered her in. He had already procured her a doctor’s white gown and headdress, which would make her look less conspicuous inside the ICU. She slipped it on quickly in the ladies’ room before following him into the unit.

They made their way casually to room 7, passing unnoticed. Once inside, Ramazan shut the door behind them quietly.

“We won’t have a lot of time,” Ramazan told his wife.

“How long do you think?”

“I’ve been able to keep him in that half-conscious state for around fifteen minutes at a time, maybe a bit longer. Then I have to put him back to sleep before he becomes too alert. It’s a balancing act.”

Nisreen studied the sleeping patient, then looked at her husband intently.

An electric feeling was coursing through them. They’d never done anything like this before, never conspired together to try something that had an element of danger to it—although this wasn’t so much dangerous as it was liable to cause an awkward moment, one that Ramazan could surely talk himself out of if they were discovered. It was mainly the potential outcome that had them all abuzz, the possible revelations that the man might unwittingly share with them if he was telling the truth.

“Ready?” Ramazan asked.

She sucked in a deep breath. “Definitely.” Then her face lit up with an idea. “Wait,” she hissed, reaching out to stop him.

She reached under her robe and brought out her handbag, a slim black leather tote with a shoulder strap. She dug inside it and pulled out her mobile phone, keyed in her passcode, then accessed its camera and set it to video mode.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to record this,” she replied. “If he’s telling the truth, it would be crazy to let it happen without a record of it. We need proof.”

“Proof? You want proof of what we’re doing?”

“Of course. We have to.”

“No,” he insisted. “Put it away. It’s too risky.”

“I know it is, but this isn’t just about you and me. It’s much bigger than that.”

Ramazan just stood there, frozen for a moment, looking tortured by indecision. “If it turns out to be true and your recording were ever discovered…”

“I realize that,” she interjected. “But we need to document it. Every word. We can’t risk losing any of it either.”

He stared at her, frozen and wide-eyed—then he relented.

“Fine.” He shrugged. “We might get our necks chopped because of it, but… as you wish.”

She nodded the grisly image away, visibly nervous. “We’re wasting time. Come on.”

He turned and got to work. He tweaked the IV lines and amended the dosages of the anesthetic and sedatives that were snaking through the man’s veins, all while keeping a careful eye on the readouts of the instruments monitoring his heartbeat and his breathing.

The effect was faster than it had been the day before, as the tattooed man’s body was gradually progressing on its journey to recovery. The first sign was a flicker of movement behind his eyelids, then a twitch of his fingers. Then his eyes fluttered open, slowly, a small war clearly being waged to keep them from closing.

“Good to have you back, your excellency,” Ramazan said, glancing at Nisreen, who was holding her phone to face the patient and recording. Ramazan leaned in so that his face was hovering over the man and forced a soothing smile. “How are you feeling?”

There was a lag as the man, perfectly immobile and still with half-dead eyes, seemed to process the question. “Good,” he mumbled. “My mouth. It’s very dry.”

“Here,” Ramazan said as he picked up a cup of water from the side table and brought its straw to the man’s lips. “Small sips, slowly.”

As the tattooed man drank, Ramazan glanced nervously at Nisreen. She leaned in with her phone to get a closer look at him. His eyes were still drowsy and didn’t pan over to take her in.

Ramazan put aside the cup. “You were just telling me about your world,” he said in a calm, comforting tone. “About how it was before you changed it. So fascinating.”

The man closed his eyes and breathed out heavily as he responded with a few slow nods. “Yes, my world,” he mumbled. “A very different world.”

“And so France in that other world… it wasn’t Ottoman?”

The question seemed to confuse the man. “No… it was French.”

“And the rest of Europe?”

A partial clarity was slowly bringing light to his eyes. “Italy, Germany, Greece—they were all independent countries.”

“Christian countries?”

“Of course.” His eyes swung left and right, roaming the ceiling, as if his mind were looking for an anchor. “The Ottoman Empire was gone. What was left of it… a small part… was called Turkey.”

“I see,” Ramazan said, visibly keeping any amazement and nervousness stifled, acting as if this were the most trivial and casual conversation he’d ever had. “And what was it like here, in your world? Did you know Paris?”

“No.”

“I wonder if it was as beautiful as it is today,” Ramazan offered.

The man nodded meekly. “Oh, yes. Paris was famous for its beauty. But it was falling apart. The West… it was all falling apart. And it was all their doing.”

“Whose doing?”

The man’s expression soured. “Them. The West.”

Ramazan wasn’t sure what he meant. “How? What happened?”

The man frowned as he took a brief moment to formulate his reply. “They were obsessed with the wrong enemies—immigrants, Islam, Russia. They couldn’t see their real enemy.”

“Which was…?”

“Their arrogance… and their greed.” The man’s eyes took on a heightened clarity as the screen of his monitors indicated a rise in his pulse. “The Americans… they were the worst of them all.” His words were coming easier now, less slurred. “If I miss one thing from that world, it was watching them crumble, victims of their own stupidity.”

Which came as a surprise to Nisreen and Ramazan.

“Why were the Americans so bad?” he asked.

The readings on the monitors rose further as the tattooed man’s voice took on a clearer, sharper edge. “They thought they were special. And in many ways, they were. They put a man on the moon, they made phenomenal medical advances, they outlasted communism. They had all the wealth and technology, the most advanced weapons—but then they started believing that everyone should live the way they do. And they couldn’t see how wrong their world was, how decadent they’d become, or how sick their society was.”

He licked his lips to moisten them, and Ramazan helped him sip some more water. After he was done, Ramazan asked, “Sick? In what way?”

“They had this obsession with freedom. All men are created equal, they liked to say—even though the ones who first proclaimed it were proud slave owners, and this deluded, misguided vision kept growing. But this freedom, this untamed democracy—it was a poisoned chalice. It led to a society where almost anything was allowed. Say anything; do anything. There was no shame in anything. Couples lived together without getting married, without asking for their parents’ consent. Girls had abortions like they got a manicure; they had babies out of wedlock. Women paraded around half-naked. Men married men. They lost all sense of right and wrong.”

He asked for more water. Ramazan helped him with the cup, then checked the IV drips. This time, the man didn’t need prodding.

“The only thing that mattered was to make money,” he continued, fueled by an inner anger that was now pouring out. “It didn’t matter how you made it as long as you got away with it. The more outrageous and corrupt you were, the more they admired you. Everyone in power was a liar or a cheat or bought by big business. Politicians were in it to feed their wallets and their egos. Bankers and industrialists funded them to get even richer while the poor got poorer. They boasted about being the champions of human rights while backing vicious dictators and destroying countries for profit. They bragged about democracy and demonized countries that didn’t have it, but they didn’t really believe in democracy. They believed in hypocrisy. Their moral compass had spun out of control, from the very top down. One of their presidents sent them into a long, disastrous war that they knew was based on lies, and he was still reelected. Another president, a married man, was caught getting a blowjob from some girl in his own office, and they still worshipped him. Then his wife tried to become president after him,” he added, his words dripping with mockery, “a woman, to run the most powerful country on the planet. Imagine the cheek of it, after such a scandal.”

Nisreen couldn’t help but interject. “You said tried,” she asked. “You mean it was actually possible?”

Rasheed turned his head slightly sideways, momentarily confused by the new voice. Nisreen quickly lowered her phone and leaned back, but she couldn’t avoid his seeing her.

“You…? Who are you…?”

Ramazan stepped in quickly to divert his attention and keep him on track. “Your excellency, please.”

Rasheed turned to him, visibly confused.

“The woman, who wanted to become president. You were saying she tried.”

Rasheed turned his eyes to Nisreen, then back to Ramazan, and for a moment it looked like he was too dazed to reply.

“She didn’t succeed?” Ramazan prodded in a soft tone.

Rasheed turned his head slowly so he was looking at the ceiling again, then he scoffed. “She lost, of course. Even without the scandal, it was too much—a woman, after a black man. That drove them crazy. Deep down, they’re racists, you see. They all are.”

Ramazan looked at Nisreen, both equally bewildered by what they were hearing.

“A black man was president of America?” Ramazan asked, trying to dampen the incredulity in his tone. “There are blacks in America? Free blacks?”

His mind flashed back to what he knew of the Christian Republic’s history. Slavery of black Africans had begun in America long before the Ottomans had taken Vienna. But after the sultan’s forces had swept across Europe, a tidal wave of European refugees fleeing the Muslim invasion had landed on America’s shores. White indentured servants and workers were plentiful, and the importation of Africans petered out. Religious fervor grew as a reaction to the Islamic conquest of Europe, branding anyone who wasn’t Christian and white a threat. A violent rebellion of black slaves in Virginia was put down, after which all blacks were expelled and sent to Africa, even those who were born in America. The Christian Republic, as Ramazan and Nisreen knew it, was exclusively Christian and white.

Ramazan’s question visibly confused Rasheed. “Free blacks?” He seemed to stumble on it for a moment.

“You said they had a black president, then a woman tried to be president, too.” Ramazan reeled him back. “But she failed?”

Rasheed’s brow furrowed as he struggled to formulate his thoughts. “Yes, that’s right… But they got even worse. They elected a con man instead, an ignorant crook who craved adoration and did and said whatever it took to win. That tore them apart even more. I would have loved to see how badly that turned out, but I left shortly after it happened. It didn’t matter. Their world was crumbling.” His look took on a glaze of deep animosity. “They called themselves Christians, but there was nothing Christian about them. They just worshipped money, sex, and brainless entertainment. A flashier car, bigger breasts, and more likes on their Facebook posts: that’s what they lived for, and yet they dared look down on us and criticize the way we lived. These fat, lazy, stupid bastards were happily filling their bodies and minds with junk to the point that they became proud and defensive about their ignorance. And that was the ultimate sting of democracy, you see: the insane idea that one man’s ignorance was just as worthy as another man’s knowledge. The ludicrous idea that the vote of the uninformed is just as valid as that of the educated.”

A pregnant silence smothered the room. It was a lot to digest.

“But what about the rest of the world?” Ramazan finally asked. “What about France and the rest of Europe? What were they like?”

“Oh, it wasn’t just America. The rot had spread across Europe, too. The same decadence was everywhere. The same foolish, stubborn belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance that callous, corrupt rabble-rousers were using to grab power. By spreading all kinds of lies and making the mobs believe that their great heritage, their jobs, and their future were being stolen from them, the corrupt manipulated the mobs into voting them into power. It was all going to end badly, not just for them but for us, too. Their collapse was going to bring pain and misery to our lands. It always did. We were never more than pawns in their ego games. It had been that way for centuries. Which is why I believe God sent me this gift. Not just for the glory of our people, but for them, too. Much as it was far from my intention; perhaps I saved them from themselves. Europe has been united for centuries, and the Americans—look at them now. Their president serves for life and the destructive squabbles of frequent elections are avoided. They’ve still got their values, their traditions. They’re even challenging our empire,” Rasheed said as his face took on a confused tinge and he lapsed into a distracted silence. “Which I must do something about,” he then muttered, almost to himself. “I really should…” His eyes took on a faraway stare as his words petered out.

Ramazan turned to his wife, not knowing what to say.

Nisreen looked stupefied, her brain visibly struggling to process every word, every nuance of what she’d just heard. Ramazan had never seen her so profoundly unsettled. He felt the same.

He glanced at his watch and then looked at her. She understood.

He knew what she was thinking. He could have sat there for hours, too, listening to the mystery man, asking him questions about this strange alternative world he claimed to have lived in, but he knew they didn’t have that luxury. They were running down the clock on the man’s state of consciousness, and, besides, there was the hospital staff and a potential interruption to consider.

It was the moment of truth. It was time to ask the key question.

He checked the IV drips, tweaked them gently, and then turned to the tattooed man.

“Your excellency,” he asked, “what you say is fascinating beyond compare. But tell me, how is it that you are able to do these things?” He sucked in a deep breath, then added, “How are you able to travel across time?”