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Yusuf almost wasn't born. It was only by the quick thinking of the obstetrician and nearly a month spent in the NICU that he slid into the world in a rush of blood and skin. The first time he opened his mouth to bawl, his parents wept for joy, and it was both his gift and curse that even though they tried, they couldn't give him any siblings. Yusuf was the quintessential only child, the scion of two MIT professors. He went to all the best private schools -- even the Catholic ones, though his family at home recited the Shahada -- and after school he learned to play violin and little league soccer.
It was okay, he supposed. When he was nine, his cousin Fathiyya started competing in regional spelling bees, and Yusuf's parents encouraged him to do the same. He and Fathiyya faced off against each other for the next nine months, and Yusuf traded soccer for dictionary and etymology lessons while grumbling at how much his parents fit the ambitious immigrant stereotype. He didn't see any of the other kids doing anything so geeky. He said this even while he collected bugs in the park and chattered about being an entomologist to all the friends and relatives who would listen. He had a pet tarantula named Bob Hope, who he used to terrorize his female cousins until they got their revenge by replacing his shampoo with bleach, getting all of them into a heap of trouble.
At the bees, Yusuf learned how to spell meticulosity and hydrophyte and ursprache, but never unununium, which ended his run at the state bee when he was twelve.
When he was fifteen, his family moved from Boston to Washington. On the day of the move, he hid in his best friend Jason's basement with a blanket and a bag of gummy bears. His parents, when they couldn't find him, called the police in a panic. He even made the local news, and everybody was in a bad mood when they finally arrived in Washington, least of all when Yusuf immediately tried to hitchhike back to Boston.
When he was sixteen, the girl he was sort of seeing told him she had a crush on their teacher and sorry, could they be friends instead.
When he was seventeen, he smoked pot for the first time and hung out with a group of guys who liked to steal cars and swing baseball bats at mailboxes. Yusuf didn't have a baseball bat so he used a hammer instead. It was sort of dinky.
When he was eighteen, he stopped.
Yusuf almost didn't become a chemist. During his senior year of high school, his parents sat him down and told him to shape up or get out. "Your grades are decent," his mother said. "You can probably get into most colleges. Not Ivy League," she added disapprovingly, "but other places. What do you want to be?"
What a question, he thought. What did he want to be?
(Smarter, smoother, handsomer, better with the girls, not an only child, not Indian, not a virgin, the owner of a new gaming system, happy).
"A geography teacher wouldn't be bad," he said.
So he started at the University of Washington in the geography program, learning about land masses and resources and where Venezuela was in relation to Peru. He aced all of his assignments for the first two months, but then his roommate opened a sports betting pool and that was that.
Drunk and engrossed in the latest Mets game, Yusuf would say, "Did you know that you don't spell unununium with an A?"
"Shut up, Yusuf," his roommate would reply, and Yusuf hated the jagged shape of those words more than any others. He hated it almost as much as he hated the laughing, joking “go back to India” which was supposed to be funny but only made his spine want to curl up inside of his skin. His palms started sweating each time someone mentioned the I word; he hid the Qur'an that his parents packed for him when he left for college.
Two semesters in, he quit geography and went into political science. Half a semester later, he threw his political science notes in the garbage, sucked in his gut, and went into chemistry. His reasons for choosing chemistry was unclear – a mixture of too many sci fi novels, drug culture, and those damn fucking spelling bees – but his reasons for staying were never in doubt.
This was what Yusuf loved about chemistry: the cleanness of a perfect equation, the messiness of all the molecules crashing into each other, the enlightenment of a discovery, the ambiguity of the electron, the saving power of a pharmaceutical, the destruction of a hydrogen bomb.
Yusuf almost didn’t graduate. He was with his girlfriend Liza driving on the highway, Ricky Martin shaking the radio as Liza sang along, her hair whipping through the open window as Yusuf laughed and laughed at her squeaky impression. Then a truck swerved sharply in front of him, he shrieked as he slammed the breaks, and Liza wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
It was the only time Yusuf wished he had gone into biology instead. If he had been a doctor, a paramedic – maybe then he could have saved her. Maybe then he wouldn’t have been the useless sobbing wreck in the middle of the road, his hands full of blood and his head cracked open.
There was therapy after. A lot of therapy. Yusuf skipped as much of it as he could and slanted his eyes away from his therapist’s clinical pity.
There was also the dreaming.
This was what Yusuf knew about the dreaming: the pounding terror of the wheels on the rainy road, the startling panic of the headlights, the way Liza went from belting out tunes to being slammed against breaking glass, the snap of his own neck jerked forwards in a cavalcade of pain that left him in a brace for half a year, the crunch of the radio, the atonal screech of metal.
Liza’s parents did not invite him to the funeral.
Yusuf finished his degree in a blur of deferrals and hollow shock, and the day after he received his diploma in the mail, he checked himself into a sleep clinic.
Yusuf almost didn’t become interested in sleep technology. There were two sleep clinics that he knew of in the state, but only one of them was associated with military-sponsored research. It didn’t matter to him then. He nearly picked the other one because he wouldn’t have to drive there.
But his parents said, face your fears.
His parents also said, the parking is cheaper too.
The chief doctor at the sleep clinic was a woman named Dr. Opal. Yusuf tried to crack a joke about priceless jewels the first time they met, but it died on the air awkwardly and Dr. Opal fixed him with her serpentine stare while jotting notes on her clipboard. “Come with me,” she said, and Yusuf followed her obediently to a room in the back of the clinic where she injected him with a gooey green substance and he wanted to ask what it was, but Dr. Opal was more than frightening enough for him to keep his mouth shut. These were professionals, he assured himself. They knew what they were doing, and all he wanted was to stop dreaming.
He thought, foolishly, that it would be easy. But it wasn’t. As Dr. Opal explained, no one really knew where dreams came from, so no one knew exactly how to turn them off. The drugs she was giving him were all strictly experimental, hence all the forms and waivers he’d had to sign. Oh, thought Yusuf, who had never been one to read the fine print, so that was that they were.
Yusuf was only meant to stay at the clinic for a few months, but it turned out there was something special about his unconscious brain patterns. Or so Dr. Opal claimed, and sometimes he felt too much like her lab rat, the unconscious body she drugged and hooked up and studied like a slab of meat. But most of the time, he was intrigued. After much attempted charming – and more actual whining – on his part, she started explaining the chemistry behind it, and it was on the day that she told him it was possible for humans to share dreams that he decided this was what he wanted to be.
He still dreamt about Liza, but Dr. Opal looked pleased behind her stern expression. She pushed her glasses up her nose bridge and said, “You’ll have to go back to school. Get a Master’s. Probably a PhD. If you want to work the classified research, no one will hire you without a PhD.”
Yusuf swallowed against his nervousness, against the recollection of his previous failures, and said, “Will you write me a reference letter?”
She nodded. He punched the air.
This was what Yusuf loved about grad school: that, at some point in the indeterminable future, it would end.
The man standing before him was wearing tweed and Yusuf bit his cheek to stop from making a remark on how that gave him away as a British agent more than anything else, even the accent, which could be faked. Yusuf wasn’t entirely sure which agency this man worked for. The name had been mentioned to Dr. Opal in the clinic lobby, but Dr. Opal was bad at passing on these details; her definition of need-to-know information was the cause of her postdoc assistants’ despair.
“So,” Yusuf said while Dr. Opal had wandered off for a coffee. “What is it again that your people want from us?”
“The Somnacin,” the agent said. “Or whatever beta version you have of it by now. Your reports are bloody awful, by the way. Totally incomprehensible. Like a dinosaur with claws wrote them.”
“I didn’t know you got the reports in Britain,” Yusuf said. “I thought it was just an American project.”
“International cooperation, what can I say?” The agent spread his hands and beamed, charming still in tweed. “Hey, why aren’t you wearing a lab coat?”
“I trip over it,” Yusuf said.
The man snickered.
“It’s not that funny,” Yusuf said. “It’s a real hazard!”
“Oh, I have no doubt,” the man mocked, and Yusuf hoped that there would be tests involved so that he could jab him with a fat needle.
Dr. Opal returned with her coffee mug and her blank morning face. “Mr. Eames,” she said. “Sorry to keep you waiting. I see that you’ve met Dr. Attar. He is my brightest research assistant. He can put you in a dream state as smooth as butter.”
Agent Eames grinned. “I’m sure,” he said. It sounded like he was flirting. With whom, Yusuf wasn’t sure, but he suspected that it was anyone and everyone. Earlier on, he could have sworn Eames had been trying to hit on the potted plant in the lobby. Yusuf rejoiced when Dr. Opal told him to prepare the needles and he gave Eames a smile of his own, flicking the needle with his index finger as Eames rolled up his sleeve.
“Make a fist,” Yusuf directed.
“One question,” Eames said. “Are you going to--”
Yusuf jammed the needle into a vein. Eames slumped over the examining table.
“That was more force than was necessary,” Dr. Opal observed, sipping her coffee and still not looking entirely awake.
“Was it?” Yusuf asked innocently.
Yusuf almost never left the U.S. He had no plans to. He had a rewarding, well-paying job helping Dr. Opal with the military research and feeding off the strange stories they heard from the agents and soldiers who paraded in and out of the clinic. He learned about the PASIV, about extraction, and even – murmured under Eames’ breath one time when he swung by for tea – about inception. “It’s not possible,” Eames said. “Yet, anyway.” And Yusuf privately thought that Eames had no imagination. He could already see ten hypothetical scenarios where inception might be possible, though he never said so to Dr. Opal, who, despite being at the frontier of cutting edge research, was rather conservative.
They had their disagreements over it. Yusuf would push Dr. Opal to try a new patient or tweak a solution in just this way, but Dr. Opal was cautious. She'd emigrated as a young girl from a war-torn country where she had to hide from the soldiers, though which country she wouldn't say, and would only mention that Opal wasn't her real name. "Did you think it was?" she laughed, refusing to tell Yusuf her original name, even when he tried to bribe her with jujubes. “It’s all behind me anyway. I’d rather focus on the present.”
But Yusuf didn’t want to focus on the present. He wanted to focus on the future, so finally Dr. Opal took him aside and said, “I think it’s time we parted ways.”
Yusuf, whose face always gave his emotions away despite him practicing otherwise in the mirror, was hurt. However, Dr. Opal waved aside his feelings like a puff of smoke. “I have a colleague in Kenya who works with the PASIV. He needs a partner in his lab, so I recommended you.” Then she gave him a sudden, wholly surprising hug, and he put his head on her shoulder. “You’re going to do great things, pipsqueak. I expect you to keep in touch.”
Yusuf beamed until his cheeks hurt and he tried to hold Dr. Opal for as long as he could, but she stepped back briskly and said, “Enough of that. Let’s get back to work.”
This was what Yusuf loved about Mombasa: the patchwork streets, the seven layers of the sunset, the smell of fish and meat from his neighbour’s apartment, the taste of cold water on a hot day, the lab where Dr. Wangai worked, the folding tables on the walkways where old men and young played games, the women in the marketplace, the long and colourful nights, the immutable stretch of history, the feeling of waking up in the morning and feeling completely at rest, Eames.
“I thought you were off being James Bond,” Yusuf said when Eames showed up out of nowhere and invited him out for a drink. “Blowing up cars, sleeping with skanky women, firing guns, that sort of thing.”
“Not so much these days,” Eames replied and didn’t explain further. “Speaking of which, have you ever fired a gun?”
Yusuf rolled the alcohol over his tongue. “No,” he admitted.
“But you’re American.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Yusuf asked.
Eames laughed. “Don’t worry, love. Finish that drink and I’ll show you.”
Eames had a place in Mombasa but he was always traveling. He paid Yusuf a small sum to watch over his place and water his plants when he was gone. When he was in the city though, he would call Yusuf up so they could go out. Yusuf wasn’t sure if this meant they were actually friends. Eames seemed to view Yusuf and his occasional awkwardness as a source of unending entertainment, which was acceptable because Yusuf viewed Eames much the same way. He listened avidly to Eames’ sleek stories, but never ceased laughing when Eames had an uncharacteristic slip, like tripping over the sidewalk or knocking the bowl off the table. Those moments were the best. Yusuf learned to carry around a camera just for blackmail material; Eames would bring him underground materials from his various jobs if Yusuf threatened to embarrass him enough. Or American junk food. Yusuf did miss American junk food.
Oftentimes, after they had dinner, they would go to the shooting range. Yusuf never did learn to be a great shooter, not like Eames, but he enjoyed the power of the firearm in his hand. He'd heard rumours about rogue PASIV scientists and agents, so he wanted to be prepared.
Also, one might need to know all sorts of talents in a dream.
“Hey Eames,” he asked one day after they were leaving the range. “I’ve got a question for you.”
“Yeah?” Eames said.
“How do you spell unununium?”
Eames thought for a moment. Then he shrugged. “I’ve got no fucking idea.”
“Me neither,” Yusuf said, and he felt an ache in his chest relax somewhat. The next week, he bid an amicable farewell to Dr. Wangai and paid the down payment for a space Eames helped him find near his apartment. He knew already what he wanted it to be; knew it with a clear-minded purpose that had eluded him throughout most of his childhood. He sent off an email to Dr. Opal, who replied with a curt note of congratulations and then followed up with more leisurely email listing the basic supplies Yusuf would need for his own practice. Which Yusuf knew, of course, but he sent back an email that went :D :D :D
Liza had loved his smilies. She used to ask him to draw them on her arm, and then she would wear them around campus and he would act all embarrassed but secretly love it. Especially when he drew them on her paunch tummy and she would take off her clothes so he could see better, her curly hair tumbling down her naked back, her smile sly and affectionate.
He wrote her name on the wall of his new shop. Eames said nothing, which was a relief, while Yusuf capped the marker and then turned in circles. “This is good,” he said. “This is really good.”
And Eames promptly whipped out the champagne, though Yusuf had no idea where he’d been hiding it since his jeans were so tight. At least they weren’t tweed.
“So,” Eames asked casually when they were sprawled over the rickety furniture that’d been left in the room because they were so awful even their previous owner didn’t want them. “How many people in Mombasa do you think will be your clients? How many have problems with dreams?”
“Many,” Yusuf said, thinking of himself. “Many, many, many.”
“More importantly: what’d you think they’ll pay?”
Yusuf punched the numbers in his head. “That’s what’ll get me through.” He offered another number. “But that’s what I really want. Maybe if I was back in the U.S, that’d what I’d charge.”
“Are you ever planning on going back to the U.S?”
Yusuf thought of his parents, aging, and Dr. Opal, still shuffling around her clinic with her eyesight getting worse and worse but her brilliance only increasing. “Someday I’ll go home,” he replied. “But life’s just getting started here, you know? I’m meeting lots of interesting people and dipping my fingers into lots of interesting projects. Why would I want to give that up to stay in my backyard?”
“Mmm, exactly,” Eames said, finishing the rest of the champagne in a languid gulp. “Have you ever heard of an extractor named Dominic Cobb?”
Yusuf will almost go unremembered. In the future when the existence of dream technology is made public thanks to a mole in Cobol Engineering, Ariadne will write a book, hoping to correct misconceptions. She will talk for pages about her early collaborators, about her mentor Cobb and her colleagues Arthur and Eames. She will devote one paragraph to Yusuf, and she will spell his last name wrong. It won’t be her fault. He never told her, after all, the right facts. He never sat her down and explained how hard it had been to get behind that steering wheel, how nervous he’d been about the efficiency of the drug, how guilty he’d felt when he saw Fischer in the airport afterwards and nearly forgot that he wasn’t supposed to know him. These will be the songs of Yusuf’s life, and they will be small in the face of so much grandeur, but they will be enough.
He knows his own story better than anyone else’s.