The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” the woman said, but there was. Her eyes were bloodshot with a yellowish tint. She looked much too thin, as well as pale and exhausted, which could have been the result of a boat ride during a storm, of sleepless nights while traveling, of diesel fumes, of many possibilities, but I wouldn’t be able to tell without examining her.

  “She’s a doctor,” Emma said in English, whether to the woman or the husband I wasn’t sure, but it was the eldest daughter who jabbed Emma with her finger a few times. “She, doctor?”

  She couldn’t have been more than ten, and she already had a head scarf, which I found strange. During my teenage years, when my father used to take us on trips to Deir ez-Zor, there were few women covered, let alone girls. Emma playfully jabbed the girl back, then jabbed me: “She, doctor.” Then she pointed to herself: “Me, nurse.” And then to the girl: “You, Tarzan?”

  “No,” the girl said, in an ardent tone. “Me, doctor.” She paused, then extended her hand toward Emma. “Me, Asma,” she said. “Me, doctor.”

  Emma didn’t hesitate. Instead of accepting the proffered handshake, she pulled the girl into an intimate hug, wet mingling with wet. “Asma, my Asma,” she said. “Best doctor in the world.” She stood up, took the girl’s hand. “Let’s get you all into dry clothes so you don’t come down with some nasty cold. Come on, all of you. Let’s go change and find something nice for your mother to wear while she stays here and talks to this good doctor.”

  I had no idea whether the husband and three girls understood a word she said, but they followed her toward a van. As I watched them walk away, the three young girls holding hands, Emma turned around, gave me a smug look. “If you need me, wave your arms in the air like you usually do. I’m watching.”

  Four refugees stood a few feet away, all young men. One with high-rise hair, his coat soiled with every imaginable sort of stain, genuflected as if praying but made a joke of kissing the beach. When he rose, his face was decorated with patterns of sand, which all four found excruciatingly amusing.

  Alone with me on the crowded beach, the woman clutched her swollen 1940s handbag with a terrified and resolute suspicion. I berated myself for my lack of manners.

  “My name is Mina Simpson,” I said. “Forgive my impertinence. This is my first time here. I was nervous and didn’t think of introducing myself properly with all that’s going on.”

  She forced a smile. I did not need a diagnosis to see that she was feeling pain. She consoled me by explaining that social niceties were the first things to disappear in a crisis, although they shouldn’t, and she was happy that we were able to correct this minor misstep. Her name was Sumaiya, from a village outside of Hussainiyah, north of Deir ez-Zor. Her husband’s name was Sammy. Easy to remember, Sammy and Sumaiya. They were meant to be together, she said. Her family escaped from Daesh rule and regime bombing, mangy dogs all of them, she was never going back, and still, as much as she regretted it, she was not going to allow me to examine her. Her right hand lay on the upper right quadrant of her abdomen.

  “I won’t tell anyone without your permission,” I said. “This is between the two of us. I’d rather examine you here with just us, instead of waiting until you get to camp, because I don’t know what it will be like there. Will you let me?”

  “No,” she said. “Not here and not in camp. Maybe when we get to the end of the line, where we’re supposed to live, maybe then.”

  And Pallas Athena’s wise owl flapped her wings in my brain. I finally understood, stupid me. She was gaunt. Icteric sclerae, abdominal pain, right upper quadrant where she held her imitation crocodile-skin handbag, for crying out loud, Mina. Even her skin looked jaundiced now. Had her loose clothing been wetter, clung more to her form, I would have noticed the distended belly.

  “How long have you known?” I asked.

  I watched her face register shock once more, except this time she recoiled. Her eyes turned beady with anxiety. I should backtrack. I didn’t want her to be frightened. I paused, then held her left hand. She would not look at me.

  “I won’t say anything without your permission,” I said softly. “I promise you.” And then, to make it more official: “I swear on my mother and father.”

  “What do you know?” she asked me, still facing ahead, toward the sea, toward where her past, her home, once was.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m only trying to figure things out. I’m guessing you don’t need me to examine you. You know what’s wrong, and whatever it is, it’s serious, serious enough that no other ailment caused by travel or sea voyage is going to make much of a difference. You’re afraid that if we find out, you will be sent back. Am I wrong so far?”

  I could no longer read the expression on her face. Was she still afraid? Relieved? Curious? She remained silent, her eyes fixed east. I was right for the most part. I knew that. I might not be an oncologist, but I was not blind. I didn’t want to force things. Francine jokingly calls me her bull dyke for many reasons. Don’t leave me alone in a china shop. Sumaiya knew it was fatal, not just serious. How to be delicate?

  “You’re not afraid of being sent back, are you?” I asked. “No, you’re not. You don’t want your family to be.”

  She offered a weak smile.

  “What kind of cancer?”

  “You’re doing a good job,” she said. “Why don’t you guess?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Not without examining you, but if I’m forced, I’d say liver, or that seems to be what’s most apparent.”

  “See,” she said. “You don’t need to examine me.”

  I didn’t need to ask if she was on any treatment. Figuring out her medical history would have been next to impossible. I knew that every hospital in her area had been blown to smithereens by the Syrians, by Daesh, by Russia, by the United States. Everybody had had a go at doctors and their hospitals. I wondered who had diagnosed her and how long ago.

  “Do you know if the disease started in your liver or elsewhere?” I asked.

  “Liver,” she said softly, wistfully, without looking at me.

  I squeezed her hand, told her that I would do everything I knew how to make sure she wasn’t returned, which was highly unlikely in any case. I had only arrived the day before, I said, and knew little about what could be done on the island and who could help, and then I pointed toward Emma in the parking lot surrounded by Sumaiya’s family and staring at me from way over yonder. She could help, I told Sumaiya. She worked for a Swedish NGO that had all kinds of doctors, and she would know how to make sure that they were not returned. Not only that, but she was trustworthy. If we told her not to tell anyone, she wouldn’t. I extolled Emma’s competence and discretion until Sumaiya relented.

  I waved my arms in the air.

  My Family

  My father often drove to Deir ez-Zor to hunt fowl along the Euphrates, all kinds of birds, ducks and geese and quail and grouse and pheasant. Once or twice a year, he would drive for nine hours from Beirut, spend a few days, and return with a bounty that would be distributed to his friends, since his wife cared not one whit for cleaning or cooking the damn things. He went mostly by himself, and I wondered whether his passion was the hunt or the solitude. Since he was married to my mother, I thought it was the latter. But then, Deir ez-Zor was where he had met his beautiful and energetically ambitious wife, and he had already been going there since he turned eighteen, so it might have been the hunt. He was twenty and she seventeen when he brought her to Beirut, much to his family’s chagrin since hers was of much lower class. His family shouldn’t have worried too much, because she was much more class-conscious than all of them put together. After her marriage, she set foot in her hometown once and only once, for her father’s funeral. My father kept to his hunting schedule; once or twice a year, he would drive to Deir ez-Zor, stay with his in-laws, sleep in their house, and eat with them. She wanted nothing to do with th
e town or her family. She could not convince him not to go, and he couldn’t convince her to accompany him. They compromised when it came to the children. The three boys could accompany him every few years but my sister never. Luckily for my mother, no one but my father cared much for the city or her family: the drive was too long, nothing to do over there, too hot in summer, too cold in winter, lumpy beds.

  I visited Deir ez-Zor twice only, including for the funeral of my grandfather, whom I barely remembered. What I did remember was that my mother made sure we all dressed in our best and that she’d bought a black dress we could barely afford.

  I would not want you to think that my father and mother did not get along, not at all. She worshipped him until the day he died. He was above all for her—and not simply because of tradition. Whatever his faults, and they were plentiful, she loved him in both a godly and an ungodly manner, for he used to look at her as if she’d arrived on a scallop shell, the smell of sea on her hair. She was his holy spirit. Their neuroses were perfectly complementary; their insanities fit together like a jigsaw. The odd piece was mine, not theirs.

  I used to love him as well. When I was young, Mazen and I would wait for him to get home from work. The first thing he did upon entering the apartment was unlace and take off his shoes and hand them over to us. My nose would detect an ammoniacal odor. One black shoe on each of our laps, Mazen and I would sit on the old storage bench in the entryway, he to my left because he was left-handed. We would hand polish them to the perfect shine, rub them with a clean rag, delicately shove a cedar shoe tree into each, and then store the shoes in separate cotton bags. Before leaving for work the following day, he would unwrap each shoe as meticulously as we had wrapped them. When he returned from his hunting trips, we would have to take his boots out to the balcony for a vigorous scrubbing. He certainly loved his footwear.

  When my father died, Mazen, the only family member who crossed my picket line after years of silence, sent me another photograph that my mother did not eradicate, a picture of my father, Firas, Mazen, and me on the one hunting trip to Deir ez-Zor. My father was the center in the photo, of course, holding a shotgun, a round mound raising a Beretta double-barreled over-and-under. Mostly whites and light grays, faded pewter and oyster, the photograph was of long ago, the sixties. His oiled hair was much darker than anything else in the picture, darker than the gun, the metal temples of his aviator glasses whiter than white. I remembered him that way, in that pose, the shooter of birds. When I imagined him, I even saw the vest he was wearing in the picture, its color in real life a diluted beige, wide enough to hold his sizable waist, with four deep, low pockets for carrying shot shells. Firas and Mazen, hyper and overtestosteroned, shot out in different directions, he the sizable sun, they his rays of sunshine. I stood next to him, the top of my head barely reaching his belt. I, his youngest offspring, his little black cloud, drip-drip-dripping tears—the brute brute heart of a brute like you—unwilling or unable to step away, my mass too tiny to resist his gravitational pull. That was what I remembered from my childhood. That dear child a false translation of who I was.

  I was not surprised that Mazen would send a memorial photograph that included me crying. I was helpless with guns. I remember the exact make and model of my father’s two shotguns, one for skeet and one for bird, but nothing about the one he handed me. Was it a fourteen gauge? He gave it to me in the morning and took it away moments later because I almost shot him as soon as I loaded it. He told me in his comforting voice not to fret because I couldn’t have hurt him much given the size of the shell, but we both knew otherwise. I couldn’t tell you which felt worse to him, the fact that I was hapless with guns or that I broke up in tears when the contraption went off, the pellets exploding right next to his foot, the circle on the dirt barely larger than the diameter of the shell, but I could tell you in minute detail how his devastated face looked that day, the shock, the horror, the sorrow, the open mouth, the white wide eyes with black dilated pupils, as if he’d returned from the ophthalmologist, the globular nose and its oddly circular nostrils, one smaller than the other.

  Your Family

  I would trade my family for yours any day of the week including Sundays and major holidays. Except for Mazen, he’s my bud. And his children, my niece and nephew, I like them. The rest you can have. I can’t believe you write about such horrid families even though yours has supported you throughout. When I first read you, I thought you must have been ostracized, disowned, disinherited, blackballed, all that kind of shit. The vast, abrupt chasm between your narrators and their families is clearly delineated, keenly felt. I was sure it was autobiographical. Then I met your family. They adored you, always had. I kept wondering how someone so loved could feel that alone, how you could remain unsated—a congenital condition, I assume. Even Francine wasn’t able to figure that one out, and believe me, she’s worked with all kinds of desperate people.

  Maybe your family can adopt me.

  The only person I talked to about my family was Francine, of course. I didn’t mention them to friends or to my first partner, Jennifer. I buried them in a chest. I explained who they were to nosy Francine because, you know her, she could finagle any secret from anyone, which she could do effortlessly long before she passed her psychiatry boards.

  Take My Kist

  Had I not wanted anyone to see the content of my chest of secrets, Francine made sure to tell me long ago, I should have locked it. Not necessarily an elaborate lock, just a sign that the content was private would have been enough of a hint not to look within. Francine called the chest a kist and kissed me every time she used the term. Buy a small lock, she suggested. Wrap twine around your kist; tie a ribbon in its eyelets. She’d know not to snoop. Lock my privates, I joked. Both of us jittery, neither wishing to prod too much, not willing to commit either a silly blunder or an egregious error, to risk the first slight swerving of the heart. Francine had just moved in. During the weekend we brought all her stuff, all her baggage, her kit and caboodle joining my kist. We sat on one side of our bed, mine alone not a few days earlier, now impeccably made with her favorite dusky-brown duvet, the smallish chest between us, facing the closet where she found it, where she’d excavated it from under a myriad of cardboard boxes of books and papers and trinkets. I wished to point out but chose not to that a chest whose top had my original name, Ayman, amateurishly carved into the softened wood with a Bic pen should have given her pause. I saw traces of blue ink in the grooves of the script. It was possible that someone else might not be able to; it was possible that I was seeing the ink I supposed was there that had faded long ago, that I used to see. I knew I was making too much of this situation. The chest was a depository of my past, my book of reminiscences, just the thing I should be sharing with my lover. I should relax, unfurl those tense muscles in my shoulders. But who was I kidding, the strain in my body was palpable. My stomach called out for antacids. It was silly, I could easily talk myself out of this nervousness, could soothe this budding anxiety. I could make a joke. I always made jokes. I was good at that. I could repeat an aren’t-we-all-afraid-of-intimacy cliché, any relief. Had I been the seer Tiresias, I’d have come up with a funny line to soften the pronouncement’s blow: Listen, Oedipus, remember how your dad said you were getting too old for your mom’s goodnight kiss, well, let me tell you . . . Was this a Tiresian moment? My life before and after the opening? I feel ridiculous, I explained. I don’t think there’s anything more than papers and pictures in here. I want you to see them, and I don’t know why I’m terrified of that. Francine kissed me without having to mention kist. I’ll show you mine, she said, if you show me yours. That was how it began.

  With its old hinges yielding with a woeful moan, I opened the box, pandoraed it, and unleashed my demons unto Francine’s world. Don’t blame me, I warned her.

  The Family

  We had to register the family with the police, find them shelter for the night, make sure they left for Athens soon, get S
umaiya diagnosed, on a treatment schedule if possible. She needed stronger pain medication than paracetamol. She’d had nothing else. She must have dealt with such pain. I brought stronger stuff with me, but I’d left it all in my hotel room. Stupid me. Oxycodone? Yes, I bought one bottle. Morphine as well. Half my suitcase was filled with pills of all sorts. I hadn’t even unpacked them yet.

  I wanted Emma to fix the problems. She knew what to do, where everything was. She chose to commiserate with Sumaiya, holding hands and speaking in soft tones and broken languages. Sumaiya’s husband, Sammy, sat on the sand cuddling with the middle daughter. I asked Rodrigo if we should take the family to be processed. No, we were to wait for a bus that would transport all the refugees to a camp called Moria; we couldn’t fit all five in our car.

  I felt helpless. What could I do?

  I was a connoisseuse of helplessness, impotence my intimate. At times, like Orpheus, I felt I could sing to life itself, to defeat the reaper if only for a little while, but I also had to watch in despair as Eurydice was dragged back into the underworld. I’d heard complaints about doctors and their god complex, particularly surgeons. I’d been around physicians most of my life—some were arrogant, some were plain assholes—but I had yet to meet one who thought she was omnipotent. But then neither was god, if she or he existed. We were able to do incredible things every now and then, but often we were helpless. We were godlike in the sense that we were both omnipotent and impotent, and like god, often all we could do was watch and witness.

  I took out my phone, went online to figure out as much as I could about hepatoma. I wondered if I should get a local phone number to save on roaming charges.

  Asma, the future doctor, unwrapped the top of her sandwich, leaving the rest of the tinfoil to keep it from falling apart. She examined the content between the bread, then took an exploratory first bite. The tinfoil made her look like a bird with a silver beak. She found the taste strange but tried another bite. I explained that it was peanut butter and jelly, a strange American invention. She thought it was much too sweet for a sandwich but kept on eating.