The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

  Except I wasn’t sure of my world when I was sixteen. I was not sure of anything. I presented myself as a boy then, a muddled boy, full of false bravado and little hope. I would spend years in high pretense perfecting my confusion.

  How I Learned to Drive

  Mazen taught me to drive long ago. I wasn’t exactly sure how we thought that was a good idea. He was barely eleven months older, just turned seventeen, no license yet, but our father had taught him, as he had our sister and older brother. Mazen was ready; he was a man. He thought I was. We borrowed our brother Firas’s car, a beat-up Peugeot that he’d inherited from our mother, primarily because it was so old that it had the habit of dying capriciously while idling. The Peugeot would then refuse to be resuscitated until a suitable time had passed, say, two minutes, at which point you had to hit a particular spot on the engine with a wrench or hammer for the car to come back to life. My mother worried about being stranded. Her eldest didn’t, rarely worried about much. The Peugeot ended up his while my mother had to wait for more than a year to get another car. I remember this because Firas, not my mother, was forced to drive Mazen and me to school whenever we were running late. During those early years of the civil war in Lebanon, driving to school, driving anywhere, was an adventure.

  Mazen decided that the best place for me to learn was in the mountains, away from traffic, away from police or the gendarmerie and, most important, away from my parents or, worse, Firas, who would have been none too happy with my learning on his car. It must have been a Saturday or Sunday because I remember we ended up spending the whole day until I got the hang of depressing the clutch and shifting gears. I wasn’t necessarily a slow learner, but every now and then I would lift my left foot off the clutch too soon, and the car would lurch as if convulsing with its last breath and die. We’d have to wait for the whupping and resurrection.

  In the evening, we had to abort the lesson because the weather was changing. The air turned soft and dense, which in the mountains announced the arrival of a storm. Along our descent, we saw an accident; a black Mercedes Ponton taxi blocked much of the road, its four wheels raised toward the sky like a cat exposing its belly. There were at least four cars parked on the side of the hill, a dozen men milling around. No injuries, no ambulance, no police, just bystanders and a couple of militiamen exaggerating their importance, desperately trying to pretend that they had recently shot someone.

  A Little Village Called Skala Sikamineas

  The small hotel stood toward the bottom of the road, not too far from the shore. Between the two was a large plane tree in the middle of what could be described as the tiny main square, which was anything but, more like a heptagon with unequal sides. Everything was charming, if quaint. Even in the mild light I could discern the typical blue-trimmed white walls of Greek villages. The roof’s red tiles seemed more Lebanese to me, more Ottoman than Greek.

  It took me a few tries to ask the old woman who owned the inn whether Emma was in her room. Since I was unable to fathom her amalgam of Greek and English, the woman—so white haired, so fragile—enunciated her words methodically and loudly, opened her wide mouth to articulate each syllable, as if she were patiently instructing a slow-witted child. I nodded along enthusiastically, too embarrassed to let her know I was only catching every fourth or fifth word. Apparently, Emma was not in her room but was waiting for me at one of the cafés. The owner wasn’t sure which one.

  The old woman helped me carry my luggage up the stairs to my room on the second floor. She performed a long-winded soliloquy as she ascended, holding on to one side of my heavy bag. A hijab-wearing woman with weary features was mopping the floor, her left foot pushing along a gray bucket. Noticing the owner, she rushed over to relieve her of her burden, but the owner shooed her away with a flick of her head. When she laid the bag at my door, I noticed that she looked livelier, less ashen; color had returned to her cheeks, and her front-buttoned, matronly dress seemed less wrinkled than when we started. She left me at the door with the key.

  The light switch was exactly where I assumed it would be, my left hand landing on it on the first try. The room shook off its darkness. It smelled of sleep, of light dust and disinfectant.

  I was a tad nonplussed. Emma texted me the day before telling me that she would wait for me at the hotel, and then we would grab dinner. I tried calling, but her phone was off. It felt late, but it was only seven. I wondered whether I should unpack first or go look for her.

  The cleaning woman must have been good at her job. The room was spotless—its whites seemed hand bleached, every corner seemed to sparkle—and modest. No amenities here: a twin bed with a single pillow, bare walls, stone tiles on the floor, old French doors that opened to a balcony, and louvered wooden shutters the likes of which I hadn’t seen since I left Lebanon. The wood in the room smelled resinous, of fake lemon. A small lace doily on the credenza was the only decoration.

  I worried about Emma, fearing she was overstressed. A few weeks earlier, while reading the coverage of the continuing crisis on Lesbos in the New York Times, I was struck by a photograph of two dozen Syrian refugees in orange life vests alighting from a small, black dinghy. Men, women, and children, all wet and looking miserable, water reaching up to their knees, marching chaotically toward the shore. In the middle of the photo stood a resolute figure carrying a boy of around seven in one arm, while the other tried to lift another woman, likely the boy’s mother, who had apparently slipped and was on all fours in the water. I did not recognize Emma at first. How could I? Soaked, unkempt, her usually perfect hair was a mess, as was she. The saint in the picture was nothing like the woman I knew. I phoned, confirmed it was her. She’d been on the island for a while. She suggested that her NGO could use someone with my skills. Everyone was overwhelmed. The photographs published in newspapers did not come close to showing the magnitude of the disaster. The numbers of refugees arriving seemed infinite, thousands each day, and no one could see the flow decreasing anytime soon. European doors were beginning to close once again, especially after the Paris attacks, and yet more people clamored for entry. Come, she said.

  The Trouble with Emma

  I’m not sure you would like Emma. Francine certainly doesn’t, and you two tend to like and hate the same things. I met Emma in 2005 at a conference on transgender health in Malmö when she came up to talk to me after my presentation. Her hair was short and black then, sixties-style. She wore thick makeup, dark lipstick that would make a cherry envious, a tight dress that highlighted her slim figure, and a long cardigan that highlighted the dress. Francine thought Emma was too hetero, but that may have been because Emma ignored her, a faux pas that she didn’t care to correct even after I introduced them. Emma and I were able to be friends because the two of them were good at ignoring each other.

  Even though I was tired after the long drive from the airport, hunger forced me to leave the hotel room and forage for food and Emma a few steps down the hill to the main square. The only sounds were the soft lapping of waves from the sea and the squeaking of my waterproof hiking shoes on the wet tar. It had stopped raining. What I thought was a jetty turned out to be the harbor, a crooked black finger that calmed the sea. Three cats roamed the square ever so silently, as if examining their property for any damage caused by interlopers while they were away. The air stood still in front of all three cafés. Two of the cats continued to reconnoiter, but one stopped and sat on her haunches, gauging, waiting for me to decide what to do. A colony of bats appeared out of nowhere, silent in their flight. Five of them raced ahead of me and began to circle the roof of a building, probably feeding. Usually, I would consider that a good omen since I loved bats, grateful for their insect-free presence, but I figured if the building below them was a restaurant, I would avoid it even if Emma was there. I doubted they were feeding on mosquitoes in this cold.

  The first café I came across looked glassed in at first, plasticked in at closer inspection. It would be open-air in summer,
but this evening, through the not fully transparent plastic, with the fluorescent light and the cigarette smoke, the patrons looked embalmed, as if submerged in amber. And among the preserved sat Emma.

  I was trying to catch her attention by waving maniacally when I noticed the boy sitting next to her. The group of youngsters she was with surrounded her at the table, but she was seeing only him; she was the collector admiring her prize possession. There was no one in the square to notice my clownish gesturing, but a couple of café dwellers playing backgammon behind the large sheet looked my way with no little rebuke. I was making a fool of myself as usual, must have looked like an inflatable air man. I searched for the door in the sea of plastic, went in, and was slapped with the intense white blue of cigarette smoke. For whatever reason, I associated Emma with smoking, always envisioned her holding a thin cigarette in her right hand, taking long drags and exhaling small smoke rings that floated up toward the ceiling, yet I knew she didn’t smoke. It was an image seared in my mind that had no bearing in fact.

  Other than Emma and the boy she had her eyes on, there were five twenty-somethings sharing the table, three boys, two girls, evidently his friends, not hers. She held court, every bit the star and exotic outsider, and was the last to notice me standing next to her. She jumped out of the chair to hug: how was my flight, did I have any trouble finding the hotel, finding the café, no matter, how was I doing, introductions, Spanish and Italian names, the boy Rodrigo. The tornado that was Emma simply kept rolling, words and gestures swirling in her path. She didn’t expect replies to her questions. I had yet to say a word. If I needed to, she’d expect me to interrupt. She asked Rodrigo to get me a chair, but he hesitated; his brown eyes flickered for a moment, and I thought I saw fear, nay, terror. A friend of his borrowed one from another table. I ended up on Emma’s left, her boy on her right. After insisting that we two should love each other because of how important we were to her, she made us shake hands once again. He then slipped his hands under his thighs, which highlighted what he was terrified of exposing had he stood up to retrieve a chair, a rather impressive erection. Only Emma and I, sitting on the same side of the table, could see it, and to make sure Rodrigo understood whom his pride belonged to, her hand barnacled it for emphasis, blush red nails encircling a tube worm of brown corduroy.

  I had expected the makeup, the earrings, even the garish bouclé blouse. Loud, outrageous attire was her every day and every minute and perhaps would be until her last breath. Her scrubs were so well fitted they’d work as a naughty nurse costume for Halloween. What I didn’t expect were the perfectly manicured nails. I couldn’t understand how she was supposed to help refugees on boats with them. It took me a minute to figure out that they were press-on acrylics. She was fifteen years younger than me, and Rodrigo and his friends at least fifteen more, yet I looked less of a contrast to the kids. I had my frumpy eternal college student look down pat. My corduroys happened to be brown as well.

  The youngsters were all lifeguards. I’d heard of their organization, of course. A number of Spanish lifeguards had been horrified watching the news of refugees drowning when the distance between Lesbos and the Turkish coast was an hour by boat, two at most. They became one of the most effective NGOs working the island. I asked, in my broken Spanish before switching to English, how many of them could swim to Turkey from here. All four boys said they could. The girls hesitated. One of them said she might be able to. The other said she couldn’t without serious training for a while, maybe a year, at which point the first agreed that she couldn’t either without training, and then she suggested that neither could the boys, especially since they all smoked. A loud, chest-thumping argument ensued, which allowed my mind and eyes to wander.

  There were a couple of non-youngsters in the café, two women on the other side, older than I, eating sandwiches. Both had harmoniously white, hastily bunned hair, pale dresses and cardigans; I wondered if they were sisters. A young man at the table next to ours spoke classical Arabic a bit too loudly, a bit too earnestly, showing off an excellent command of the language for a nonnative speaker. He droned on and on about his studies; I gathered he was a doctoral student in Arabic at a Polish university of some repute. A couple of Arabs at the table next to his, North Africans, I presumed, played backgammon, trying hard to stifle their mirth. For many of us, little is as amusing as listening to classical Arabic being spoken aloud.

  A waitress behind the counter, her head shaved almost bald, raised the volume of the speakers. I must have registered bewilderment or surprise, because the lifeguard sitting on my left explained that the singer belting out that ballad was the high priestess of soul, Nina Simone, a true artist, he insisted. Slowly the voices of the customers seemed to gain urgency. The older women asked for the check. They appeared to be in a rush suddenly. It seemed they knew that the mood had shifted, that a match had been struck, and they did not wish to be stung by the fire.

  A gravid atmosphere fell upon the enclosed café as if from the ceiling. The boys in the room seemed to sit with more swagger, wanting and failing to look at ease, all of them tense and self-conscious. Laughter would burst out in various corners and die down again. The smell of stale smoke, beer, and pheromones. Kinderstuds preening, kinderlasses coy, hair flips at three different tables. Emma and I looked at each other, laughed, and flipped our hair in solidarity.

  “They’re young,” Emma said, “and high on endorphins from being here and doing good work. Most of them go back to school in a few days, desperate hormones.”

  “A few thousand years earlier,” I said, “and we’d be having a bacchanalia.”

  “That would have been simpler,” she said. “Having all the cute lifeguards at the same time, instead of one at a time.”

  She explained that Rodrigo, her newest, was returning to graduate school in a few days. She would miss him. Luckily, she said, with the weather being bad, they’d had more time to fuck. Many of these men had never been with a trans woman, she told me, and she intended to correct that imbalance, a public service. My sandwich was tasteless, the cold beer went down with no resistance, and that was all that could be said for it. And then I had the lightbulb moment; interrupting Emma’s monologue, I asked what she meant by having more time. She explained that rain and stormy seas meant no boat crossings, no new refugees, and for the next week or so, since this was the holidays, there was an abundance of volunteers, students, Arabic speakers. There were enough nurses on the island that she could take time off until all the disaster tourists left and the refugees returned.

  “But Emma,” I said, “what am I doing here then?”

  Her eyes, which were slightly asymmetrical, widened; her face registered surprise or a small smile, as if she were not fully in control of her facial muscles. Too much time must have passed since her last Botox injection.

  “Well, you know,” she said, fidgeting in her chair, “I thought Syrian refugees, I thought Lesbos, I thought of you. You’re meant to be here. It’s destiny. If there’s a break in the rain tomorrow, we’ll get some boats. I’m sorry, darling. When you called we were overwhelmed, and we will be again soon, as soon as the weather improves and the holiday volunteers leave.”

  “Emma,” I said, shaking my head. “I’m booked for only a week.”

  “Can you extend?”

  “Emma,” I said. “You begged me to come. You said you were desperate. The situation was dire, you said. You could really use another doctor. Emma, I put everything on hold to come here. I even asked my brother to come.”

  “Tomorrow could be worse,” she said, trying on a sheepish smile, “or better for us. We might get boats.”

  “Emma,” I snapped.

  She began to promise me the world. We would drive to a beach south of Mytilene. A boat had landed there today in spite of the bad weather. She’d heard that there were more volunteers waiting than there were refugees, but I’d still be welcome what with all my skills. It wasn’t her
fault. She had no way of knowing that many volunteers would show up for Christmas and New Year, but they would all go back too soon. I should stay a bit longer. She spoke without looking at me but at an area on the ceiling, so possessed was she by the intensity of her excuses and the capriciousness of the gods who screwed up the weather for me, as if winter rainstorms would have been unheard of had there not been some Olympian meddling going on.

  The truth was that I had not had to cancel many professional obligations. I, too, had time off during the holidays. What I was missing by being here was our thirtieth wedding anniversary. Francine had encouraged me to come. It was just a date. We could celebrate after my return; my being on Lesbos would be good for me. She felt I’d been bored recently, antsy, spent too much time in my head. I seemed stuck in idle, she said, not shifting gears, and worse, I wasn’t communicating, whatever that meant. I needed to be reminded that what I did mattered, that I still lived in this world. She couldn’t join me, unfortunately, but I should go, go, go.

  The Dance with Marley

  You know, our anniversary is not the date of our wedding. We’ve had three of those, two ceremonial and one recognized by the state. It’s not when we first met, and it’s not our first date or our first assignation, which was the day after. Our anniversary, January 6, 1986, is the date of the dance.