The Unknown Known
I wonder. Will there one day be a book called The 7/29 Commission Report, running to 567 pages, including 118 pages of notes? I still believe there will. And what a tortuous tale it will tell.
The One Eyed One, the One with One Eye, referred me to another one with one eye, his Justice Minister, who referred me to his Justice Minister (another one with one eye). The initial scouring of all the country’s prisons and madhouses yielded 423 CRs. It was a hazardous journey they faced (there would be attrition), so I authorized a second sweep with a different kind of inmate in mind: compulsive paedophiles. This realized an additional 62. The 485 compulsives were corralled in a barracks near the capital and prepared for departure with heroin and straitjackets. As a further refinement, those who didn’t have it already were infected with syphilis D.
When I went to America, I went there by plane. But I hardly needed telling that the unscheduled arrival of a jumbo jet crammed with scrofulous sociopaths would have raised some eyebrows at US Immigration. The first leg of the compulsives’ journey, then, was a 900-mile drive in the trunks of old taxis. When we performed a ‘test run’, using a dozen assorted criminals and lunatics, the fatality rate turned out to be one hundred per cent, so we were careful, next time, to poke a few more holes in the back panelling, and we reluctantly reduced each load from four to two. This meant that the drivers had to come back for a second batch while the first took its ease in holding kennels at the port. Although I was inflexibly resolved to lead UU: CRs/G,C myself, a sudden indisposition forced me to stand down; so all authority in the field devolved upon the ferocious figure of Colonel Gul, commander of the First Mechanised Battalion. On August 3, 2001, chained to the hold of a disused container ship, my compulsives boldly set sail for Somalia.
NOTE: At which point (for reasons I will later mention) I abandoned this skeletal typescript of ‘The Unknown Known’. The much fuller manuscript version followed the compulsives on their sanguinary journey to Greeley, Colorado (Greeley, after all, is the cradle of Islamism: it was there that Sayyid Qutb’s Milestones, known as the Islamists’ Mein Kampf, was decisively shaped). The disused container ship is hijacked by Filipino pirates; the surviving compulsives spend two years in a punishment block in Mogadishu; they are then deathmarched across Ethiopia into Sudan, where they encounter a host of some 30,000 janjaweed, who kill all the compulsives under thirty ‘as a warning’; the remainder (now consisting entirely of paedophiles, plus the implacable Colonel Gul) continue west by bus and on foot; they are severely mauled by a child militia in Congo, armed with pangas… And so on. Finally, one CR makes it to Greeley, Colorado, where, half-dead with syphilis D, he is found weeping in a cinema car park. Meanwhile, Ayed’s marriages decline to the point where he retools his RodeoMaMa in the outhouse called Known Knowns, and resolves on a paradigm shift, an Unknown Unknown, which is sure to succeed: a suicide operation in his own home. The unknown known of the title is of course God.
I abandoned the story for many reasons, all of them strictly extraneous. As I have said, Islamism is a total system, and like all such it is eerily amenable to satire. But in the end I felt that the piece was premature, and therefore a hostage to fortune; certain future events might make it impossible to defend. If I live to be very old, I may one day pull it out of my desk — at the other end of the Long War.