Had he not sulked, had he listened to his mother, had he gone to Northwestern, had he anything, he would have remained a man. Without his leg, he said, he was half a one. He was no longer whole, no longer inviolate.
He was unable to talk to anyone, not his family, not his old high school friends. Everyone he knew seemed to be living in an insular world, desperately trying to stave off anything that would remind them of their own pain, and he felt he was nothing if not a reminder. He understood that his friends wanted to avoid him as much as he did them.
He decided that was no accident: losing his leg was what was meant to be. A teaching that he was not learning, a Buddhist karma or dharma or something. Not an accident, not random, not a desultory fluke. Fate could not be capricious. There must have been a point. He had done something wrong and had to pay for it with a miserable life. His great loss must have some significance.
As Francine says, “Insanity is the insistence on meaning.”
She has a talent, though, my Francine. At his lowest, his weakest, when she was unable to break through to him and his mother was at her wit’s end, Francine left him a book of poems by Frank Bidart, the first of which was about a man who had lost his arm. The poem began brilliantly with instructions on how to bandage your stump (firmly, firmly, in order for the stump to remain cone-shaped) and ended with a revelatory line about how blood, amputation, and rubble gave the city of Paris its grace. That, however, was not what Pete read in it.
In the poem, the narrator had an illumination: the solution to his pain was to forget he had ever had an arm. The lost arm had never existed. Pete had become obsessed with the image of who he was, a true man, of what was lost. Once upon a time he had two legs. There was a man called Pete who could walk without a hobble, who could run like an antelope, who could play the manly game of football. The memories crushed him, and he must therefore cut them off. He would start anew, seeking oblivion. Memoryless, he’d launch himself into a new world. And he did, or at least he tried.
Pete boarded a flight to Lilongwe, Malawi, with a small duffel bag and his prosthetic leg. Once again, during the next three years he would hardly speak to his mother, his friends, his family. He would try to reinvent himself as a packless wolf. He would later tell Francine that he couldn’t be around his mother because she reminded him of who he was. He felt that the way she looked at him day to day was a further violation. The wolf limped across the Malawian countryside, stayed in the poorest villages, helped build houses and dig wells, taught children in various small schools. For a while, Pete found a home in that country.
It was during his African sojourn that he and I grew close. He needed medical advice, and he had less of an issue with me than with Francine since I wasn’t his mother’s cousin. I began to receive calls whenever one of the village children became ill. I helped however I could.
He lasted for three and a half years in Malawi. The country had settled his mind and his nerves, he told me. Yet the longer he stayed, the more he realized that something about what he was doing in Africa was dishonest. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was at first. Yes, he was lonely, but that wasn’t exactly the problem. He was not among his people. The chasm between African Americans and Africans was immense. As time passed, he began to realize that whenever he visited a new village, he would feel guilty. He began to understand that he was using the pain of others to alleviate his own. He couldn’t keep going, he told me. As much as he was helping, he could no longer live with the fact that he was using the suffering of poor villagers to satisfy his sentimental needs. He needed them to suffer, he told me, in order to feel needed, in order to reinforce his privilege.
He couldn’t go on pretending. After all, he said jokingly, he wasn’t white.
One day while on his exercise walk, he heard the song from Titanic on his handheld transistor radio, and the damned thing wormed itself into his ear and made itself a home. He couldn’t get rid of the voice of Céline Dion looping in his head. And when he returned to the village where he was staying, a number of the women were humming the song. He saw that as a sign. His heart most certainly could not go on and on. He returned home.
Happy ending: back home he began to work with an attorney on the South Side who specialized in tenant rights. He was still there. Surprisingly, or maybe not, he fell in love with and married an Iraqi woman from Michigan. He worships his twin girls. And to this day, his mother is still trying to get him to go back to school.
He wanted to cut off his past, he once told me, so he could smother his dreams. His mass-produced dreams had all been designed for men with two legs. Whenever he looked in the mirror, though, there was only the inevitable image, the one leg. He thought he’d forgotten much while in Malawi, but it turned out he’d only put things aside. He’d locked his past in a kist that wasn’t terribly secure. It worked temporarily, giving him time to settle his soul. After a while, he realized that without his past he couldn’t be whole, yet he wasn’t whole anyway. He could keep trying to forget or ignore his past, or he could reclaim who he was. Neither choice would make him whole; neither would make him true. No amount of optimism could return what he’d lost.
What to do? Go on, he said. Go on and on, as much as he loathed that stupid song. Go on and hope for bespoke dreams.
The Boy with the Midas Touch Touched Himself
“I can’t believe it,” Mazen said. The sun appeared from behind low clouds, casting a bit of pink, and suddenly his face was lit like a stage actor’s, his hair given a sacred halo. “How could refugees organize? Many of these people have never owned a computer, but all of a sudden now they’re supposed to be able to create sexual-assault Facebook groups. I can’t see it.”
“I can,” Rasheed said.
“You can?” asked Mazen, more surprised than annoyed at being disagreed with.
“Of course,” Rasheed said. “They’re young men, after all.”
“Come, come,” Mazen said. “Not all young men are rapists. I most certainly wasn’t. I know my son isn’t.”
“Your son is gay,” I said.
“He’s bi,” Mazen said, flipping me the bird. “He went out with a girl once in high school, and he was a gentleman.”
The sun seemed brighter all of a sudden, easing the bluish cold a bit. Half of my now-darker shadow lay on the ground, and the other half fell off the short cliff toward the soccer players.
“The reason not all young men are rapists is that we distract them,” Rasheed said. “Sports, football.” He nodded his head toward the soccer game below us. “Superhero movies, the internet, porn, and so much more. Unless we keep these boys entertained and preoccupied, they’ll keep our world in turmoil for the next half century.”
“That’s an overgeneralization,” Mazen said, “and completely unfair.”
“Maybe,” Rasheed said, “but look at them. Look.”
For a minute or two, the three of us, sipping coffee out of paper cups, watched the delirious soccer game one tier below. Young men having fun, running, jumping, not caring that they had commandeered an area between pup tents where families lived, that all the other refugees had to walk around the claimed field. A prone old man marked one of the field’s sidelines. He slept on his side, with a hand under his cheek, his lips parting and shutting every time the ball whizzed by.
“Look,” Rasheed said, again nodding his head but this time to three young Syrian men on the cement walkway. They sauntered up the hill with shuffling steps, preening and swaggering, as if on a promenade on their properties. Another young man, with narrow eyes and a dark-green overcoat, an Achilles in training, leaned against a wall, seemed to be waiting for something. He sulked, looked like he disapproved of the three boys, of the soccer game, of the camp, of the whole wide world. He loathed the errors and blunders of creation. He, too, inspected his property, and found it wanting.
“We live in a world that promises these young men that they will r
ule it,” Rasheed said. “What happens when they find out it’s all a lie? If you’re supposed to be the top dog, and suddenly you have to rely on others to throw you scraps?”
“No one promised me I could rule anything,” Mazen said.
“That’s because you’re special, dear,” I said.
“Many young men everywhere feel that the world owes them something,” Rasheed said, “but in our lands it’s double trouble with mothers’ irrational adoration of their sons. These boys grew up believing they were meant for great things. Opportunities were supposed to rain upon them. Do you know what Iranian mothers call their baby boys? Doodool tala. You’re my doodool tala, aren’t you? Come to mama, doodool tala. We don’t have an Arabic equivalent, though we really should. It means golden pee-pee. How can a young man not demand that the world kneel before his gold penis?”
All Hail the Mighty Harold
You were raised in the desert of Kuwait in the 1960s, a time when it was a desert in every sense of the word: sand, heat, and technology’s greatest gift, air-conditioning. There was nothing to do. Your family and you were expats, strangers in a barren land.
You read.
You read everything in sight, anything within reach. You started out with comic books, of course. You began before you could put letters together to form words, let alone words to form sentences. Superman and Batman, Wonder Woman and the Justice League, Archie and Jughead, Asterix and Obelix, Casper and Richie Rich, Tintin, Little Lulu and Little Lotta, Lucky Luke and Baby Huey. You graduated to Enid Blyton books: The Famous Five and The Secret Seven series.
As a child you knew more about how to serve tea in the afternoon than how to converse with Kuwaiti kids.
A story: You were about seven. It was Thursday morning, the weekend for you, but your father had to work. You were in the living room reading, maybe one of the Secret Sevens. Your mother yelled your name from her bedroom. She spoke loudly and slowly, in a tone she used whenever she wanted to be exquisitely understood. “Call your father right now. Tell him to bring a doctor right away. I’m fainting. It’s an emergency.” You did as instructed. On the phone your nervous father asked how your mother was, and you replied, “She’s in her room, probably fainting.” He arrived not ten minutes later. He walked into the living room, found you sitting in his chair reading. Incredulous, he asked you where your mother was. You replied again that she was in her room. You grew nervous. You were reading in your father’s chair since it had the best light. If he didn’t return to work, he’d reclaim it and you’d have to use another. Your Egyptian neighbor, a doctor, rushed through the door. You pointed to the bedroom. An hour later, your father came out of the room and lectured you. You should have checked on your mother. She had fainted, hitting her head on the vanity as she fell. She woke up bleeding. That was when she called to you. Then she fainted once again. Your mother had only told you to call your father. You did that. She didn’t say she needed you. Your book did, so you’d returned to it.
As a child you knew more about how to fight injustice than how to understand that your mother was in trouble.
But your mother understood, for she, too, was a reader. She would read in one corner of the living room and you in another, the two of you in your antipodal armchairs, feet tucked under butts, books held up at eye level, lost in another world, a world richer than Kuwait’s oil-laden desert.
It wasn’t long before you began to pick up her books. At the time she read mostly best sellers, the only books easily found in expat bookstores. Frederick Forsyth, John le Carré, James Michener, Jacqueline Susann, and . . . Harold Robbins.
You read them all, of course (Sparkle, Neely, sparkle!), and more, much more. The writer who captured your heart toward the end of your preteens was your dear Harold. It wasn’t just the sex, although that certainly was a big part of it. You were twelve, after all. His was a much-maligned oeuvre, you once wrote, whose value to sexually deprived young boys was underappreciated. The sweeping emotional dramas, the grand betrayals, the triumph of good, and the delightful sentences (She stroked his penis with two fingers) were perfect reading when you were twelve.
A charming fact: Let any used Harold Robbins book fall open to the creased parts, and one would find all the dirty bits. This spine-drop technique worked anywhere in the world. You even tried it on a Robbins book in a house in Chengdu, China. Worked every time.
The book that snared you was The Carpetbaggers. You couldn’t put it down. Summer in the mountains of Lebanon, you were twelve, cocooned on a couch, and your cousins—all girls, all older than you, all taller teenagers—insisted that you accompany them on a walk. Fresh air and all that. They dragged you out, chatting, giggling, strolling along the mountain road. You lagged behind a few steps until you were able to open your paperback. You read as you walked. A large truck was parked on the side of the road. Lost in the wholesale vengeful world of The Carpetbaggers, you walked right into that truck and slammed your head against one of its brake lights. Your cousins couldn’t stop giggling for a week.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, infatuations fade, and rather quickly. You had another cousin, three years older, whom you’d desperately looked up to. You spoke to her about your love.
“I must read that book of yours,” she said, and she did.
You were disappointed but mostly astounded that she wasn’t crazy about it, not even a little.
“What about the story? What about the adventure?” you asked.
“Such a story,” she said gently, returning your dog-eared copy, “I’d rather see in a movie. I like my books a bit different.”
It took some months, less than a year, for you to lose your infatuation with Robbins and his cohort. In those days you fell in and out of love with writers quicker than Byron did, but that book, The Carpetbaggers, was a marker. After it, you began to read books that were “a bit different.” You began to grow. You still read everything in sight for quite a while, but Robbins began to sound childish to your adolescent ears. The fact that you now considered the book puerile was proof that you had finally become a man.
Your bookshelves smiled with new weights and colors. Rejected though it might have felt, your faded lightweight pocketbook still found a place between your new loves.
When the Lebanese civil war started in 1975, you were fifteen. You were shipped to boarding school in England and after that to the United States. Your family didn’t leave Lebanon. You returned regularly during those years, once every six months or so. You slept in your room in your house in the mountains among your books.
In 1982, with the open involvement of the Israelis, and the Americans soon after, your parents knew that your house and your village were no longer safe. Your mother packed the valuables, the sentimental and the expensive, and shut the house down. She packed your record albums, hundreds of them, and your books.
She saved your books. On your shelves in San Francisco, you have a few hardcovers from those days: Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, the Sea and Henry and Cato, John Fowles’s The Magus and Daniel Martin, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and the book you treasured most, Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas. She didn’t save any of the paperbacks, definitely not The Carpetbaggers.
After the American battleship New Jersey sent a sixteen-inch shell through the roof of your house, burning it in the process, your family didn’t have the heart to inspect the house for four years. The fact that various armies and militias camped in it during that time had something to do with the lack of inspection. The Israelis, the Syrians, the Druze, Christian, and Muslim militias all were guests in your house.
In the summer of 1988, your father took you up to look at the remains of your home, what was once his pride and joy. He’d been to the house before that visit, but it was your first time since your family left four years earlier. He joked that it was in better shape than most of the Roman ruins in the country. Political and obscene graffiti covered the half-des
troyed walls. There was no ceiling and surprisingly no floor: the parquet, the stone, the marble, all looted. Toilets, faucets, wiring, pipes, bathtubs, furniture, bookshelves, everything was gone. The house smelled of decay, cordite, and urine. Your room, which was once red, was now blood gray.
But in one of the corners of the room lay the old copy of The Carpetbaggers. It no longer had a cover, and some of the pages were missing, although you didn’t check which ones. Ragged, it barely hung together. It was the only thing in the room that hadn’t been stolen. You couldn’t tell how many fighters had read it.
You didn’t take it. You didn’t even pick it up off the floor. You left it there. You might have thought it was too dirty or something. You never saw it again.
Years later, you would begin to write. You no longer had the unfettered time to read everything in sight. Your tastes narrowed. Your close friends considered you a literary snob.
You had a dinner party not too long ago. One of those dear friends arrived bearing a gift. He intended it as camp, to poke fun at you a bit. He wished to pinprick your pretensions. Not knowing anything about your history with the book, he’d found an early hardcover edition of The Carpetbaggers at a garage sale for one whole dollar, a used copy, clean and crisp. He bought it for you as a joke. He was stunned when you burst into tears upon receiving it. Your dinner guests were alarmed watching you weep with the book in your hands.
When you write in your study, the hardcover sits in one of your bookshelves. All you have to do is turn your eyes left of the computer screen, and you can see it, at home between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marilynne Robinson.
Plan Your Honeymoon on a Greek Island
We were supposed to go back to the hotel, shower and change, and then head out to the city center for dinner. Rasheed wanted to take Mazen and me to a café overlooking the water, a hole-in-the-wall with decent food. Mazen, however, sidetracked us. While waiting for Rasheed to finish with his group, Mazen walked around and chatted people up. I watched him approach a young couple who seemed to be, like him, promenading up and down the sloping road of Moria. They chatted, their voices turning livelier and livelier, as if they were old friends who had found each other after a long separation. The boy and girl were likely still teenagers, twenty at most, obviously in love, his hand not leaving hers. She was small and slight and talked with her head down, her sand-colored straight hair covering most of her face, like a poppy preparing to fold her petals as evening descended—nyctinasty in human form. They wore matching blue trench coats that somehow managed to look ill fitting on both.
The Wrong End of the Telescope Page 20