The Magnet of Alligator Alcatraz
In Suriname, where the rivers coil like emerald serpents and the rain falls so thick it erases the line between sky and earth, there lived a doctor whose life was no longer his own but a caravan of other people’s illnesses. He traveled with a satchel of remedies through Cambodia, where monks whispered sutras to the fevered; through India, where the sacred cows walked more freely than the poor; through Colombia, where the air itself carried both healing and plague; and through the United States, where his hands were received like miracles but his foreign heart was regarded with suspicion.
Yet no medicine he carried could cure the one affliction that gnawed at his ribs like a hidden animal: the yearning for a girl in Iran who spoke Persian poetry as if her lungs were bellows of fire and roses. She was unnamed in the ledgers of governments but unforgettable in the night registers of his soul. When she recited Hafez, the verses traveled across the telephone wires like caravans of stars, and the doctor, wherever he stood—in the flooded villages of Cambodia, in the clinics of Colombia, or on the highways of America—felt himself transformed into a disciple of syllables older than empire.
It was then that he devised a plan so outrageous that it could only belong to the delirium of history itself: he would send her an intravenous injection of iron, secret and invisible in her veins, and then, from the swamps of Florida, he would purchase a magnet so powerful it could bend not only blood and bone but also borders and bureaucracies. The magnet would call to her like destiny, pulling her across mountains and deserts, through the dust of Anatolia and the waves of the Atlantic, until she arrived weightless, a flying verse, descending over Miami like a prayer answered by physics.
But fate is a scavenger bird that feasts on miracles. The Iranian police, who mistrusted poetry more than they mistrusted arsenals, discovered the plot. They declared it not love but contraband, not yearning but smuggling, and in their declaration the Americans found an echo. Since no Iranian citizen could enter the United States, the courts accused him of trafficking in Muslim souls, as if affection itself were a species of slavery.
He was condemned without trial to the most improbable of prisons: Alligator Alcatraz, a detention fortress raised on a swamp so humid that the walls perspired and so vast that the silence was interrupted only by the laughter of crocodiles who had once been men. It was said that the swamp itself conspired with the prison, that the mangroves twisted their roots into the foundations, and that the alligators, bloated on bureaucratic despair, recited Rumi when the moon was full.
On the night of his arrival, the doctor lifted his voice in anguish, and the inmates swore they heard the cry ricochet across the cypress groves:
“If I go to Iran, it is Evin Prison for me! And here—it is the Alligator Alcatraz!”
The words rose like smoke and clung to the ceilings, and the guards, unable to sweep them away, claimed they dripped from the rafters in the mornings like dew.
Soon, other marvels occurred. The magnet, which had been smuggled into his cell inside a box of medical supplies, began to hum at night, as though trying to remember the girl’s pulse. The air thickened with invisible currents, pulling the nails from the walls and dragging the cutlery across the dining hall. Inmates woke with the sensation that their hearts were leaning eastward, toward Shiraz.
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And then came the stories. Some prisoners swore they saw the girl herself hovering over the swamp, her body luminous with iron, suspended in the humid sky like a saint reluctant to descend. Others claimed that the alligators rose from the water, not to devour but to chant verses of Saadi, their jaws moving in solemn cadence. Even the swamp insects seemed to buzz in meter, repeating over and over a single line: “Beyond the prison walls lies the garden of poetry.”
The doctor, however, was never freed. He remained suspended between two prisons—Evin, which awaited him in one country, and Alligator Alcatraz, which swallowed him in another—forever condemned not for his medicine but for believing that a magnet could collapse the distances of exile, bend the bars of nations, and make love fly across the sky like a migrating bird who refuses to recognize the frontiers of men.
And the swamp remembers. On nights when the moon is round and the air trembles with heat, the waters of Alligator Alcatraz ripple as though stirred by an invisible force, and the alligators raise their snouts to the stars and recite, in broken but tender Persian, the verses of a girl who was never permitted to arrive.
