1
He had never had a cold. Not so much as a sniffle in his forty-four years of life.
When he was little, a virulent strain of measles had attacked the village. Many had died, most of them children. He had watched the bodies paraded past his window, mourners shrieking, dressed in black. In his parents' house he was healthy and happy and wondered why he could not go outside to play.
He had never had a childhood experience with the flu virus, which was probably just as well. There was no Sudafed, TheraFlu, NyQuil or the thousand other palliatives that were available in every corner drug store in the West. The only thing in the village to relieve influenza symptoms was aspirin and even that was not available most of the time. When one got sick in his small village in northern Iraq, one either toughed it out or died. But, thank Allah, flu was not a problem for Mustafa Mohammed and the rest of his family. They simply never got sick.
As a boy he had once stepped into a nest of cobras andbeen bitten a dozen times. The other adults were certain he would die but his father knew better. Mustafa sloughed off the deadly venom as if the poisonous snakes had injected him with water. The fang marks had taken a little while to heal. Mustafa remembered that they had itched a little.
Measles, mumps, chicken pox. Mustafa had never had any of them, nor had his siblings or father or any of his father's blood relatives as far back as anyone could recall.
One time there was some funny bug in the water. It was so small that you could not see it with your eyes but it had made everyone in town go from both ends for weeks. All their playmates were ill so Mustafa and his siblings played alone until the Red Cross came and fixed the problem by pouring something in the well.
The real test came after the end of the first Gulf War when the glorious leader of the great Republic of Iraq flooded Mustafa's small village with nerve gas.
Half the village population died overnight. The rest crawled through the poisoned dust, longing for death.
When the television crew from Frontline came to do a film documentary on the village a decade after the gassing, they found victims blinded, subject to spasms, crippled. They were shocked to find that the effects of the gas had leached into DNA and was being passed down to children born long after the attack. The crew filmed infants with missing limbs or limbs growing where limbs should not grow. The saddest were the children born with only brain stems who were living lives in permanent vegetative states. The television crew filmed everything they could find and then bundled up their cameras and film and left forever. They never asked about the boarded-up house at the edge of the square, the building that had housed three generations of a family that could not fall ill.
After the nerve gas attack, news of the family that was impervious to the toxin reached Baghdad. When further research revealed that no member of the family had ever fallen ill and that all members of this one unique family hadlived in perfect health until extreme old age, trucks came to the village to cart away Mustafa and his relatives.
The family with the miraculous inability to suffer sickness even with chemical bombs raining down on their roof was brought to a special facility outside the capital and turned over to the great leader's finest medical minds.
One of the first things the great leader's brilliant doctors had done was chop off Mustafa's father's hand with a big knife. Afterward, they sat around smoking cigarettes to see if it would grow back. They waited two hours.
As Mustafa's father screamed and wept, one of the scientists finally spoke into a tape recorder that by Western standards had gone out-of-date with the eight-track, but which was state of the art in the great leader's Iraq.
"Limbs amputated do not regenerate."
The scientists decided that perhaps they had gone too far with a full amputation. Deciding to apply rigorous scientific discipline, they used hammers to give Mustafa's father a compound fracture in his forearm. They studied the broken bones protruding through the skin to see if they would mend before their eyes. But not only did the shattered bones fail to mend, the whining old patient threw a bone fragment into his bloodstream and died in a matter of minutes.
"Subject appears dead from complications resulting from second procedure. Observation continues."
Perhaps the miracle of this family's alleged perfect health was only manifested when the body was pushed to its limits. The patriarch, poor old dead Hunsien, could not be pushed any further. Teams of doctors watched the body in shifts but when the stink grew too strong, it was determined that the first test subject had failed them.
"First subject's moribund state persists after thirty-six hours. Moving on to second subject."
Mustafa's mother had been fed feet-first into a vat of acid. Quickly dipped, in and out, like french fries in a decadent American fast food establishment.
Mustafa and his aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters heardhis mother's screams from the little cages where they were being warehoused like lab animals.
Mustafa's older relatives tried to explain that it was only those of Mustafa's bloodline who possessed the inability to become ill, not those who married into the family. But the doctors were efficient and would not be told how to be scientists by a bunch of weeping peasants in dog cages.
So away family members went to Allah, stabbed, bludgeoned, shot, drowned, strangled. When there were only ten men left the doctors finally moved on to nerve and viral agents and all manner of toxins.
The scientists had not believed the stories about this family were true, especially as the pile of corpses in the mass grave outside of town grew. But the great leader had charged them to learn what protected these people so that he might obtain the secret of perfect health for himself. And so they moved from bullets and blades down to things that could only be viewed under the lens of a microscope.
At last, after weeks of testing, these men of science discovered that the stories were true.
Men who had been sealed in glass tanks flooded with anthrax were as healthy coming out as they had been going in.
Sarin did not kill these strange men from the north. One died when he was exposed to mustard gas, but that was only because the doctors had gone to lunch and left him in the locked booth too long and he died of dehydration. Another asphyxiated in a sealed tank filled with smallpox when they forgot to flip the little switch that fed him oxygen.
And so they went through the entire family, with little accidents that would here and there claim another life because while science was perfect scientists were not, until only two were left, Mustafa and his older brother Achmed.
"They will murder us too, Mustafa," Achmed whispered at night to his brother from his dog cage.
The doors of all the other cages were open now. The room where they were warehoused seemed empty. All oftheir relatives, from elderly Uncle Karim all the way down to little two-year-old Samir, were dead.
"They will not take our lives," Mustafa insisted.
"Of course they will," Achmed said. "They have slaughtered us one by one, Mustafa. They are not going to spare us. We are not special."
"I am." And Mustafa giggled.
Achmed was used to such behavior from his brother. Mustafa had always been an idiot with no sense of the world around him. The great leader had poisoned their town and murdered their family members one by one, yet Mustafa still bowed reverently whenever the bloodthirsty maniac's name was mentioned. And even though Allah seemed to have abandoned them all at the moment when they needed Him most, Mustafa insisted on reading from the family Koran daily, his fat lips moving as he carefully sounded out the big words.
He was reading the Koran now. Achmed had read from the same holy book as a child. The book had belonged to great-great-grandfather Abdullah. The goat leather cover was reddish brown and frayed at the edges. The pages were gilded with raised Arabic writing decorating cover and spine. A single rip in the corner of the front cover had been stitched closed with Chinese silk by grandmother Habbab.
Mustafa turned a page, careful not to wrinkle the ancient yellow parchment.
"Mustafa," Achmed began slowly, for when one had something important to say to his brother it was important to speak slowly so that he understood it all. "We have none of us wanted to tell you this because we were sensitive to your feelings. But since we are both going to die, it is time you learned something important. You are stupid, Mustafa. You are not as bad as those poor souls born with bad brains who must be cared for all their lives. Unlike them, you can function in the world, Mustafa. You have worked, and you can read and speak well enough. But when it comes to thinking, you are lost. Yes, you are stupid, Mustafa. And even dumber than I thought if you think we are special and will somehow be spared thecertain, terrible deaths these people in the white coats have planned for us."
"I did not say we would be spared, Achmed, I said that I would be spared. I do not know your fate, only mine."
Achmed shook his head in pity. "How do you know?"
Mustafa pushed his Koran aside and crept to the edge of his cage. Looking around to make certain no one was eavesdropping, he pressed his blubbery lips between the bars. "Because, brother--" Mustafa's voice slipped to a barely audible whisper--"the Prophet came to me last night while you slept and told me that I was destined for greatness."
For Achmed it was not even worth arguing with Mustafa. He said nothing the rest of the night a...
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