I
(2023)
This morning, my mother sat in front of me, covered neck to toe in a red-checkered, black-streaked wax tablecloth we’d been using as a hairdresser cape for a few years—fastened with a binder clip, of course. I’d been her designated hair colorist since she’d stopped trusting professionals while still in her early forties. She cursed the entire trade when one poor sod mistakenly dyed her hair a deep russet—and he was a poor sod because he was still a young apprentice at the time. He was all she could afford. My father had my mother, all of us, on a strict budget. Every now and then, I would ask if she could sit down on the floor between my legs so I didn’t have to stand while dyeing her hair. She refused, of course. I had to suffer for her elegance, she’d say.
My mother had intimate relationships with mirrors. With a tilt of her dark eyes, she stared at her reflection, at her pale neck furrowed with tiny blue veins, at the white roots in her hair, the part in the middle looking like a road marker separating two lanes. She told me she hated this mirror, the whole vanity, she was going to buy a new one. She felt certain she could find a reasonably priced one that was more beautiful than that dissembling thing before her. Mirrors are fleeting, I said, they retain nothing. There was going to be a new her in a few minutes. I began to brush dark into light. A mirror kept no record of metamorphosis.
She snorted. “You’re breaking house rules again,” she said.
“That wasn’t philosophizing.”
“Sure sounded like it. Forgetful mirrors and all that.”
“You look beautiful.”
“I’m old.”
Told her I was as well. I pointed to my hair, which was already whiter than hers. The original red turned a weird blondish in my forties, and white in my fifties, which I liked the most since it didn’t stand out as much.
“You’re in extreme middle age,” she said. “You’re not allowed to be old. That would make me ancient.”
“But you are ancient.”
“Fuck your mother.”
Her favorite expression, which always sounded off coming from her, even after years of hearing it. Anyone else saying it barely registered, but of course, my mother saying it to me was always strange.
Her head lurched right slightly and abruptly. She noticed. I noticed. Both pretended we didn’t. The dye brush remained steady in my hand. She was still in great health for her age. She swore she still could, if needed, climb the three flights of stairs to our apartment when the building’s diesel generator was asleep. Yet her body had been failing her at a faster rate, tentative tics growing more assured. At times her hands shook so much that she developed this habit of sitting with one nestled atop the other in her lap like napping kittens.
“Why don’t you let me dye your hair?”
“Now, why would I do that?”
“Because you’d look younger. We can probably find a dye that would make it look more natural than your original, which God knows was a color not found in nature.”
“How could it be not found in nature when it was my natural hair color?”
“You should let me dye your hair because I’d like it. It would remind me how I used to comb your hair as a boy.”
“You never combed my hair. Not once.”
“Of course I did. You can’t remember anything. We agree on that at least. Your memory is worse than mine.”
“And we never agreed on that. You have the worst memory in the history of mankind. If there was an oblivion Olympics, you’d win a gold medal in every category.”
“I wonder what the categories would be. I’d ask you but I’m sure you forgot.”
“Ha! Don’t make me laugh, Zalfa, or I might end up dyeing your ear black.”
“Let me dye your hair. Maybe you’d find a boyfriend.”
“How? It hasn’t helped you any.”
“Fuck your mother.”
The boy on the second-floor balcony across the street admired the lush, bent oak below my building. I was swaddled in nightclothes, whereas he was shirtless. He stepped back from the concrete railing, showing me he was wearing a pair of skimpy white briefs with a red pack of cigarettes held tightly by the waistband against his hip bone. He delicately picked out a cigarette, lit it, took a long puff, and scratched his beard before exhaling. Lusty. Were he wearing something more than underwear, I would have expected him to rearrange his privates before throwing a smiling glance up my way. It was a flirting game he liked to play. He wouldn’t look up until his performance was done. It was never overt—plausible deniability forever an option. He was meticulously polite when he encountered me on the street, whether by himself or accompanied, always nice to the neighborhood homosexual. He didn’t return to the railing, didn’t want to block my view. How old was the little scoundrel? Twenty, twenty-one? Probably horny. I hadn’t seen his girlfriend in a while.
He enjoyed the show. I enjoyed the show, but I wished I could explain that it wasn’t a desire for him I felt. I longed for the desire I used to feel for a boy like him when I was younger, a nostalgia of sorts, the deliciousness of hunger, the flush of blood. I longed for longing; I desired desire. I used to get indomitable erections when I saw a stunning guy like him, and as I aged, I’ve slid a spiral from lust to an acute echo of yearning. The helpless longing of a ghost. My mind now titillated by the memory, not the vision.
I wished to send him a thank-you card for reminding me.
On cue, the boy tipped slightly backward as though about to lose his balance and topple. He slid his palm across his chest, through the vortex of hair around his navel, and rearranged his dick in the white briefs. He looked up slyly, knowing I was mesmerized. My heart went out to him.
“Is the neighbor boy on the balcony?” my mother yelled from the kitchen. “I can invite him for lunch if you want. If you let me dye your hair, he’d probably accept.”
“I can’t even remember what to do with a boy like him.”
“Speaking of the oblivion Olympics,” she said. “I’m making coffee. Want some?”
My mother made little studied noises in the small room, a thud of a dropped book, a squeak of a table lamp being moved (probably), a not-so-soft sigh followed by a cavernous cough. She wanted me in the room, needed to talk.
Wedged into the corner, the bed my mother sat on had no headboard or footboard, just a box spring and mattress with sheets and a bedcover, an Indian kantha of the most glorious lemon yellow and pink. My mother leaned her head to one side as though she was trying to decipher one of Picasso’s Cubist paintings. She petted a purring Monet somewhat distractedly with her right hand, while his twin, Manet, lay curled on the farthest pillow. Her left hand rested on the bed, feet on the scuffed linoleum floor, a mirror image of Wyeth’s Christina. With the room so tiny, her legs almost reached the far wall. I was only able to see the back of her head, her black-black hair reaching below her shoulder. I wondered if she was or had been crying. Not for Nahed’s departure, I thought. Her tears were triggered primarily by kitsch these days: bad movies, sappy Christmas cards, and poorly dubbed Turkish soap operas. She turned to
face me. Her pinched lips had no specific meaning. When she’d reached eighty, her thin lips began to form an inverse crescent. She countered by pursing them regularly.
“This room wouldn’t feel so suffocating if we put in a window, even if it’s a small one,” she said, allowing herself another sigh. “I’m going to miss her terribly.”
“I know,” I said. “So will I.”
A dog barked in the distance—not any dog, it was Eddie, the golden retriever who lived on the fourth-floor balcony of the building next door. Neither Monet nor Manet flinched. The whole neighborhood loved the dog yet hated his habit of barking at birds. In March of the previous year, two mourning doves tried to nest along the eaves of the balcony below. Eddie barked for a whole week before the doves decided to relocate to a more upscale, less boisterous neighborhood. Eddie was by no means the loudest disturber. My cousin Nahed had to endure the sounds of human debauchery cascading from the room above at strange hours. Our neighbor was fucking his Sri Lankan maid whenever his wife left the house. Nahed allowed it a few times, after which, with my mother’s blessing and mine, she stomped up the stairs, rang the doorbell, and threatened the husband with exposure if he didn’t immediately halt this most unsensual of rackets. He did stop, he had to, but not before accusing her of being unneighborly.
“Will you?” my mother asked. “Do you miss her mother? Or will you just miss Nahed?”
“I will miss both.”
“See, I told you. You never listen to me.”
“Say thank you.”
“Must I?”
“Yes,” I said. “You must.”
“Thank you, you little shit.”
“You’re welcome.”
Nahed had left us early that morning, back to her apartment, which had taken two and a half years to resuscitate. My mother had wanted us to bid her
farewell and accompany her to the apartment, to wave to her as she entered the building’s lobby. Since Nahed was our houseguest, my mother insisted we do so even though neither of us had a car. The only way my mother was able to let it go was when my cousin pretended to be insulted that she was called a houseguest. She’d been living with us, with me, for those two and a half years—remarkably, two and a half years to the day.
“I need to clean the room,” my mother said, “but I don’t feel like it. What should we do tonight, the two of us? I don’t want to be alone, so no reading for you. Want to get stupid and play canasta? You have enough edibles, right?”
“Yes, but we don’t have enough food in the house.”
“Fuck your mother, mister.” She stood up, casually smoothed her dress before twirling once. “I can still eat as much as I want.”
At some point after Nahed and her mother moved into our inconvenient abode, my mother discovered dope. When she was high, she got the munchies, but it wasn’t for something as childish as snacks. She would eat everything in the fridge and then start cooking two different kinds of stews and scarf it all. Never gained weight.
“Bring out the drugs,” my mother said. “Let’s get stupid.”
She intended for us to build a new mood in our home.
She braced her bare feet against the railing as if testing its solidity, her ankles looking shapeless and slightly puffy. The purple veins seemed pronounced as the tawny evening glow turned mauve. Her mouth hung open, her lips loose, her hair vigorously brushed. Across the street, the building sides glistened, the air grew luminous. The bougainvillea below wouldn’t let up on its vinous rustle, its stray flowers falling upon a giant heap of plastic garbage bags that looked like a slumbering prehistoric beast. The city shimmered, shadowless now, mysterious in these last lights. My mother stared at the seated man on the second-floor balcony, probably the flirty young man’s father.
She wouldn’t move her eyes, a rigid gaze directed to the left of her legs, through the railings, down on to the man’s pipe as it glowed, waned, glowed again.
The building’s generator kicked in, announcing the time to be five thirty. I was able to rise off my rocking chair on the second attempt. I turned off our small generator at the end of the veranda. Before my mother arrived, I’d had it closer to the door. Moving it to its current location was one of her many demands. She needed it as far away from the clothesline as possible, not wanting the drying laundry to pick up any generator dust particles, which she insisted were flecks of grease. When the big building generator was on, hanging laundry had to be taken back off the line, brought out again when it went off. Our schedules were determined by the generators.
“I don’t feel anything,” she said, “or not much. Do you think I’ve grown inured to the drugs?”
“Of course not,” I said. “You’re so stupid right now, totally wasted.”
I felt as if heaven had dropped behind my eyelids, as if I were being hugged by an angel.
“You’re stupid,” she said, “not me. Fuck your mother. Does this mean that I shouldn’t have another?”
“Absolutely not. I should send you to your room.”
“Such a sourpuss.” Her hands tried first to compose her hair, then tried to rub the wildness and the chemistry from her eyes. “I will sleep well tonight. I don’t think I’ll remember my dreams, though. I never do if I have edibles. Am I talking too much again? You’ll never believe who visited in my dream last night. Mr. Cat. He showed up as if he’d been around all this time. You know I adore Monet and Manet, but they’re no Mr. Cat. No cat is or will ever be. All these years and I still think of him almost every day.”
When I was young and gullible, I used drugs hoping to travel to far-flung imaginings, to undertake glorious exploits of the mind, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. Now that I’m old and gullible, I hope for the greatest of all adventures: a night of unbroken sleep.
II
(2001 – 2021)
The Banking Collapse
The Covid Pandemic
I begin this story with the lie, and like a great whale leading other sea creatures in her wake, it was followed by a whole pod. I wish I can say I had doubts. I didn’t. I jonahed that whale, swam right through and settled in. Gullibility and I have always been chummy. In my defense, the offer seemed real, and in a sense, it was, and when it arrived, I was desperate. Hook, line, and harpoon. I was in.
An organization called the American Excellence Foundation sent me an email on Friday evening, July 23, 2021. The foundation was based in the state of Virginia all the way over in America, and in spite of the name, its mission was supposed to be global, as in, it claimed to be a nonprofit fighting disease, poverty, hunger, and inequity around the world. Impressive, and I was impressed, particularly with the content of the email: yada, yada, yada, they were great, blah, blah, blah, I was great, yada, yada, yada, and my literary sensibility was both courageous and excellent, if not exactly American, blah, blah, so they’d like to offer me a residency at their subtly restored, bucolic farm in central Virginia for three months, where they’d board me, feed me, pay me one hundred dollars a day, and provide me the space and unfettered time to work on whatever I was working on.
The only hesitation I felt when I received that email was that I wasn’t working on anything, hadn’t worked on anything for more than twenty-five years, and had no intention of working on anything in the future either. I had written a book, you see, twenty-five years earlier. But I’m not a writer, not really. I wrote a book, that was it. It was an accident.
No, the lie wasn’t that I had received an offer as a writer and I wasn’t. I never claimed to be. I taught French philosophy at a high school. I was sixty-one years old when the damn offer arrived, and I’d been teaching the same class at the same school in Beirut for thirty-six years.
My high school alma mater offered me the job in the summer of 1985 during the middle of the civil war. I was to start teaching that fall, and I was worried that since I’d be spending most of my time in French, my Japanese might atrophy. I began a writing project in Japanese, an essay dealing with taking long walks in Beirut while that civil war was going on. I thought I’d work on whatever it was that I was writing during the summer and finish it before I started teaching, for the practice, mind you, just to improve my written Japanese. I ended up working on the project for nine years. Turned out to be a book of ninety-six pages. Taking so much time to finish such a small book should have been a signal to anyone and everyone that I was not a writer. I wasn’t supposed to publish it either, had no intention of doing so. The writing started out as an exercise, which turned into a private endeavor meant to clear my mind, to disentangle my feelings of what happened during the war, to the people, to the city itself. I didn’t write about myself at all, just stories of the war and the city. I described battle remnants, memories and traumas etched into concrete. Up there was where a sniper camped, shooting no less than seventeen people, including Mrs. Bharat and Samira, her Ethiopian maid, down this street. The big hole over there was made with an RPG that missed its target by about twenty meters. I wrote it as a Lebanese stroller dissociating
from his surroundings, pretending to be Japanese. The only person who had read any of it was Mrs. Murata, a neighbor who was responsible for my fascination with Japan and had moved back to Tokyo at the beginning of the Lebanese civil war. I received an email sometime in the nineties from her niece Himari informing me that Mrs. Murata had passed away, and that she, Himari, had found my manuscript in her aunt’s papers. She wondered if I’d allow her to show it to an editor friend of hers. I found out later she’d already done so long before she received my permission.
A small press published my bizarrerie of a book, stupidly titled A Walk with the Japanese Ghosts of Beirut. Through no fault of my own, it did rather well—okay, it did very well. It became somewhat of a phenomenon in Japan, primarily because of its exoticness. I mean, here was one of those Arabs, barely a level above a brute, who could write a book in our hallowed language. Not that my use of language was beautiful, not baroque or flowery, but simple, like the walks I took—straightforward, but allegedly able to plummet its reader into immeasurable depths. Apparently, I’d spent nine years perfecting the tone that would make the book devastating and excruciatingly poignant, not that I’d spent nine years because I found the language so difficult, nine years trying to light a small fire with the ill-formed, wet branches of my Japanese sentences.
When I say the book did well, I don’t mean in biblical proportions. It was not Harry Potter, Gibran, or the Bible. It sold well for what it was. It was translated into twenty-three languages but never made a bestseller list in any country. It did well in that I was invited to read or talk about my book by a few universities and literary festivals. I was able to travel the world on other people’s money. Okay, it did well enough that I made a tidy sum of cash from publisher advances, and I put all of it away, never spent any of it, because I was terrified I would have no money to live on when I grew old, as I was right now, and I knew I could be fired at any point from my job.
I wasn’t completely candid when I wrote that teaching French philosophy was the only job I ever had. Not that it was a lie—I used to moonlight as
a performance artist, a controversial one, even, but I didn’t earn any money that way. My art was not my job. Teaching my teenage brats was.
Here, I would like to address my feelings about my book. Whenever I spoke of it in a deprecating manner, I was accused of exhibiting a perverse reverse humility, a conceit fishing for praise. Worse, a German reviewer called me a naïf master. I was neither. He compared my book to W. G. Sebald’s works, particularly The Rings of Saturn and, dear lord, Austerlitz. I know I had no say in how a reviewer saw my work, but I was filled with shame. Mortified, even. To this day, I dreamed of visiting Winfried’s grave in the churchyard of St. Andrews, kneeling, and begging his forgiveness. It might not have been my fault, but I was ever so sorry.
Yes, my book’s narrator was a walker, like Sebald’s, but the tradition of walker-narrators was as old as writing itself. It was true I wrote about the vilification of the other, but that was only concerning Beirut at a specific time. Sebald tackled the whole history of persecution. He was a master, and I a peon. The problem with the comparison was that one of the master’s strokes of genius was his use of nineteenth-century prose, updated of course, ...
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