The disappearance of Ali S.

The way I use images is a strategy that is not unlike cinematic montage. What are two shots until they go together? Early cinema, particularly silent films, work by placing two images together. The presentation that produces their significance is the juxtaposition. So, in my work, I use images as a kind of montage. For example, in Dreamworld and Catastrophe I placed the poster for the movie King Kong next to a statue of Lenin; both images were produced in 1933 and both appealed to mass audiences. This kind of juxtaposition suggests many possibilities and connections — it worries the imagination.

- Susan Buck-Morss

It is all part of the same thing. Rubens and Titian and Playtex and Motorola.

- Don DeLillo

Palikir 2017

Ali’s disappearance seems destined to persist as an open mystery which insinuates an ineffable tragedy refracted through the white noise of our culture. It was first recorded, to my limited knowledge, in a Micronesian Sentinel article, dated June 7, 2017, as follows: “Mr. Ali S., a public defender who arrived to the island three years ago, is officially reported missing by Department of Public Safety Lt. Andy Aten. The last people to see Mr. S. before he went missing are two waiters, who reported seeing him on June 1, around 1.30 a.m. ‘Dude was walking by the shore down by Nihco Marine Park when we met him after our shift. He said he was restless, then he walked into the night,’ one of the witnesses told the police.”

Imagine the gentlest of waves glistening in the silver moonlight as they lap the heavenly island’s northern shore, setting the rhythm to Ali’s feet falling on the dry grass, a cool breeze coming from out there, from the deep dark, caressing his face, the lone night heron letting out a crying song from the depth of the black sky. Imagine a message for him only.

Imagine, because I don’t know that much about Ali or about the immediate circumstances surrounding his disappearance. What I do know, I know through a handful of encounters with him in Florence and through the labyrinths that are the others who knew him to various degrees of knowledge. There’s Karim, there’s Arif, there’s Ali’s girlfriend, there’s the lieutenant. And there’s everything else, the disjointed whole to which Ali belonged whether he liked it or not.

The Sentinel is a large-print newspaper, and so Ali’s fate rests alongside a plethora of ads and other news of the local, global, sports, and lifestyle varieties. To the right of his name: how Pacific families are caught between fossil fuels and clean energy risks. Above: vegan salmon. Left: Invisalign. Below: Aquafresh.

But it doesn’t stop at the Micronesian Sentinel. Observe how the story of Ali’s fate is surrounded by a practically infinite array of symbols, events, and objects in circulation like satellites taking on endless shapes and forms as they orbit our minds.

And so:

In the June 7, 2017 issue of Life, a splendid three-piece fold-out of a Bosch triptych. Flip the page, the future from Samsung, the prototype of a foldable smartphone screen. In the June 7, 2017 issue of GQ, two images of Mourinho. Soon the medium disappears entirely, like individual stars in the sky no matter how many you add up, and you find yourself lost in that spot on the informational Milky Way that’s contained in everything signified by the signifier June 7, 2017. Like everything.

And so:

Organic matcha, GoFundMe for a 17-year old daughter’s cancer treatment, Josef Fritzl, UNHCR, F-35, Simone de Beauvoir, Tel Aviv, Gaza, Thatcher, Colgate, South Sudan, Houthis, 2Pac, Erasmus, Avicenna, MacGyver, wildfires in east Belgium, orthognatic surgery, Invisalign, CIA black site, floods in two thirds of Pakistan, Borges, Qur’an, Kit Kat black sesame, 1984, Dominique Pelicot, Tito, Nutribullet, Ryanair, Star Wars, IBM, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Seinfeld, Wittgenstein, hotmail, meteor shower, Vlaams Belang, Manifest Destiny, Donna Haraway, Naxalites, Scandinavian Airlines, Humphrey Bogart, Pacific Proving Grounds, Sanaa, September 1992, genocide, Borussia Dortmund vs. FC Kaiserslautern, Come Visit Bosnia, cellophane, ajvar, Herodotus, sex workers, Dennis Rodman, surrogacy, Artisanal Mining Site in DRC, Rocco Sifredi, Richard Pryor, Metropolis, dark matter, United Auto Workers Local 904, Florence 2008, Hittite Empire, AIDS, 9/11, cherry Coke, Calvinism, Fordism, stoicism, Ambiorix, Pech Merle, Audi Quattro, Sarajevo, Arianism, Dior Sauvage, Rabia of Basra, McCarthyism, crypto currency, Florence, Lacan, Ozempic.

This is another history, force-fed into present minds, like foie gras. A history that attacks your skin like an endless swarm of mosquitoes. One that makes itself known in nervous sweat, even after your brain has been saturated with dementia. An experience to end all experience.

Florence 2008

Look at Ali on a Tuesday in early September 2008. It’s an unusually hot morning. He stands suspended in silence, a sly smile writ large across his face. He walks up the steep cypress-lined road flanked by olive groves, on his way to Italian class held by Flavio Carnavale.

Drenched in sweat from ass-crack to chest-crack on this humid day in Bella Firenze, halfway up the hilly road he turns around to look at Florence rising from the valley, and he sees the Duomo rise like a whatever the fuck because, yes mighty beautiful and all, but fuck this heat, fuck it! He resumes to trudge his skinny ass up the seemingly infinite road, to campus, a thirteenth century convent replete with its own beauty.

In the air-conditioned classroom Ali notices that Flavio’s got on this new shirt. It’s a collared short-sleeve grey shirt with armpit sweat stains. “Cazzo fa caldissimo ragazzi!” Flavio says. In white letters on black nametape, the kind you see on U.S. combat uniforms, Ali reads silently:

SEEK TO FIND.

FIND TO DESTROY.

DESTROY TO WIN.

Across the front of the shirt black silhouettes of Apache assault helicopter undulate over Flavio’s pot belly as he paces teacher-like up and down the room. “Oh eh che bella camicia grande,” Ali says as Flavio walks by him. “Grazie mitico, cool, no?” “Eh si, si, cool,” Ali says, throws a smile at Karim, who’s seated across the U-shaped table, as if to say, “can you believe what this motherfucker is wearing? Is he for real or what?”

Ali looks at me too, and for the briefest of moments he’s convinced that he’s looking at his double. The double is both himself and an entirely separate person, and so he both knows and doesn’t know his double, and he feels infinitely close to him and infinitely far away from him.

The class, in which seven countries are represented with their accents, has as much to do with conjugating aggiungere in the present tense as with Flavio’s Decameronesque story, which goes a little something like this:

Flavio finds himself with his expired Italian passport on a train close to Bielefeld, the town where he studied German and philosophy back in the day when, in his words, the pigs were pretty much the kind of Ein Zwei Drei Nazi Polizei they are today. Flavio’s expired passport leads him into trouble with a border guard who’s come onboard to inspect the passengers’ travel documents. “Nein das ist verboten,” “no, testa di cazzo vaffanculo,” etcetera. Using his superior furbizzia Flavio outsmarts his way out of detention and deportation. A beautiful woman of noble German descent, von something, had secretly observed the kerfuffle from afar. Flavio’s southern aggression and rebellious arrogance kindles a fire in her cold, deeply authoritarian loins, and so, after a brief chat in her first-class cabin, which for some reason has bright pink neon lights, inside her he hurries, but not before he proudly flips off the German border guard standing outside looking, askance, into the cabin through the glass window on the sliding wooden door.

Look at Ali sitting at the higher seminar in a classroom with breathtaking views of the hills across the valley. The seminar is part of Ali’s PhD at UC Berkeley with a fully funded academic year to spend anywhere he likes, and he likes Florence.

At the seminar on discourse analysis in literary theory, where twelve countries are represented with their accents, including Karim who speaks Swedish with a childish Bosnian accent, Ali slips into dreaming his big daydream, the one where he’s a private detective in a Twin Peaks-like town laced with Poirot and X-Files vibes. The one where he solves mysteries and existential labyrinths wearing a trench coat in one long episode which is as long as his life. He helps people find paths through the ruins of their own deeds and of history ruining them through an infinity of predictable plotlines. Somehow all that, Ali feels, captures the pulse of reality far better than law or history or description. Maybe that’s why he likes to linger in the delightful garden labyrinth on one of the campus sites in Fiesole. Maybe that’s why he keeps thinking about something he tells every European he meets: “Man, everyone in Europe thinks that in America you get off a plane, hop in a cab and say ‘Follow that car!’ to the driver. That’s like what America’s like to foreigners. It’s not entirely untrue, but it’s also inane, and shows the superficiality of European cultural superiority.”

This time Ali doesn’t notice that I’m in the room. Nor does he know that I find his statement about America stupid and misinformed about what Europeans think about ‘Murica. What Ali expresses, I believe, is an archetypal scene from 50s noir films.

I remember telling him how I’ve seen my fair share of those on the small tubular television bought by my parents in 1997 on a payment plan. On the very same tubular screen, I also told him, would appear first the one, then the other plane, flying straight into one, then the other Twin Tower. I looked and looked, because it was on every channel, and then I went to school, and would somehow, seven years later, go to Florence. Everything in my everyday—speech, sight, school supplies, teachers, buns, screens, faces—got strangely charged that day. Similar to a moment almost exactly ten years prior, let’s say it was in 1992, when the shots when off in my Bosnian hometown, which I heard from our one-bedroom apartment, which I saw seared into my parent’s faces, which I then heard differently in the eery quiet, which I then felt in the static electricity on the brown velvet couch and on the scrambled signal on the screen of our recently bought first-ever television.

“How was it for you after 9/11?” I once asked Ali. “Fuck you think. It was hell. Like I got displaced from history,” homeboy said matter-of-factually.

Berkeley 1996

During an undergraduate political science class at Berkeley, Ali had this thought (which he mentioned to Arif, who would later tell Karim, who in turn would tell me, and now I’m conveying it to you): every motherfucker in America thinks they’re being followed, that someone’s always out to get them; government, criminals, communists, anarchists, feminists, nut jobs, grifters, car salesmen, health insurance companies, pastors, KKK. Consequently, it’s not so fucking surprising that a hell of a lot of people think that maybe it’s not such a bad idea to start following people around, to sort of preempt them following you. Because that’s the quintessential American game, also called life. Chase and run, run and chase, get or be got. The paranoid style of life. Also the reason, perhaps, why mysteries and detective shows premised on secrets and conspiracies seem so gratifyingly true in a non-descriptive way.

Florence 2008

Look at Ali sitting next to Karim and Arif at an outdoor pizzeria in Le Cure on a delightfully cool evening in Florence. I’m observing the three men from three tables away. Pretty much as always, homeboy from Seattle of Yemeni origin is wearing a thick-ass brown leather jacket with fluffy brown flaps, under which he’s wearing a checkered red-black flannel shirt, below which he treads the streets of Florence wearing hiking Timberland boots. His outfit makes him look like a Yemeni lumberjack, with that strong jawline and all. He’s got these narrow-set searching, piercing, cool, beady, and yes somewhat lost eyes behind those frame-less glasses. He’s got this long, long, hair, white and grey and fuzzy like a sheep; hair straight out of a stonewall relief from antiquity, depicting some noble warrior, priest, scribe. His face perennially aloof, like not a care in the world, but like lonely too. Homeboy’s got aura, he’s got charisma. “Fucking Flavio,” I hear Ali say to Karim and Arif, “I love that guy, funny motherfucker, but I’m not too sure how much Italian I’m learning. I’d love to go out drinking with him one day.”

Look at Ali in Karim’s apartment on Via Boccaccio watching Balls of Fury. “Fuck is this shit. You just wasted two hours of my life,” he says afterward. Arif goes “daaamn.” “Nothing personal, I just don’t watch the idiot box, like ever, and I don’t do social media either for that matter,” Ali says by way of excuse in Karim’s musty-smelling studio with a slick green marbled floor, and the smell of read pasta sauce simmering in the landlady’s kitchen, and the sound of Vespas, and the smell of exhaust and humid heat from the outside. Ali mentions how he came back to Seattle from the Peace Corps in Sudan. He ate bugs and shit for months in Africa. Worked up an appetite for American fast food. So, as soon as he landed in SeaTac he rushed over to the McDonald’s and devoured six Big Macs so couldn’t shit for a week. He’s in Florence, he says, because he needed a break from America and wanted to see the city. When he goes back, he’ll abandon his PhD, because he fucking despises academia, because he wants to become a public defender, because criminals are just people out of sync with time.

Berkeley 2027

In a moment of boredom or despondency, I can never tell which is which, I Google Ali from my apartment. I pick up the mystery in the noise. I find out that Ali had indeed become a public defender, like he said he would, first practicing in Wisconsin, then in Micronesia, of all places, and that’s where he met his strange fate in 2017.

Never underestimate one of the greatest powers of a mystery: it spawns other mysteries. Ali’s disappearance casts the shadow of mystery over Ali, and over my memories of Ali.

The mystery says: solve me. So I call up Arif, now a professor of ethnography in Copenhagen. We’d kept in touch since Florence, having formed a brother-like bond in Florence. This is what Arif tells me: “I kept in touch with Ali for a while. Last we were in touch was over email, that was, let’s see, yeah, 2016, shit. He’d met someone, a woman, another public defender. He sounded excited about going to Micronesia with her. He wrote he’d always wanted to live there. He was tired of the rednecks and racists in Wisconsin, but being his usual self, he gave no personal details, you know what he was like, my God, he never even said a word about Yemen. He told me he could practice law in Micronesia because you know they base their law on the American system. Man, this is fucking insane. How the hell he’s gonna go missing? I mean, what the fuck?”

The mystery says: solve me. So I Google the girlfriend’s name, find her number, and call her in some Micronesian village. This is what she tells me: “Did you know Ali well? I’d love to know more about my baby, like other facets of him, which you can only glean through how his other friends saw him… oh you didn’t really know him, then why the interest?…. I don’t know what to tell you. We loved each other. I can’t see how any of his clients, even those who he couldn’t help, would want to do him harm, he really believed in their fundamental goodness… suicide, yes I’ve pondered the possibility, but there was absolutely nothing to indicate that. He felt lonely at times, but who the hell doesn’t? I’m at a loss. I see no reason to believe he’s dead. No. I’m still hopeful he’ll come back and tell me the story of what happened to him. And I’ll listen, holding him in my arms.”

The mystery says: solve me.. So I Google Lt. Aten mentioned in the Micronesian Sentinel article, find his contact information, and call him at the station. This is what the lieutenant tells me: “Apart from those two witnesses, we had nothing to go on I’m afraid. Search and rescue efforts, nada. We found Mr. S.’s cell phone, it was a simple flip phone, it was by a tree not too far from the spot where he was last seen, but so what, nothing weird on it or anything. We blasted photos of him on the internet and across the island, zilch. I guess technically it’s a cold case. But I’d say the case remains both open and closed. The way I figure it, either he just got fed up with his lady or with whatever was going on his life and just you know made himself invisible, or someone offed him for whatever reason, and sometimes, I know this from experience, there’s just no reason, sometimes there’s just odd circumstance, bad luck, two objects placed together at the same time same place randomly, whatever, but in that case they made a very good job of disposing the body. A very good job.”

The parts and the whole

Look, as DeLillo says pretty early on in Underworld, Bruegel’s construction of death’s victory over life is oddly modern. The painting, which is nicely reproduced in the structure of Underworld (just sayin’), could be a scene from the New York subway, or an office corridor, or a baseball game, or, why not, a university in Florence in 2008, a shore on a Micronesian island in 2017, where Ali and I took part in the whole.