The Wrong End of the Telescope
Page 24
A moment later, I was stomping more than walking on the muddy ground. I was moving and they were trying to catch up. My shoes squished with each step.
“She’s not a child, Emma,” I said. “She may not be educated, she may not have seen much of the world, but she was able to enunciate precisely what she wanted better than you or I would have.”
“What did she say?” Mazen asked. “What did she say exactly?”
Again, I held my forefinger up, but this time only to indicate that I needed a minute. I didn’t want to cry. When Sumaiya asked me, she began to weep, and I allowed myself to join her. Tears bathed my eyes. Her words hit me hard in the stomach, in the diaphragm. I could not stop myself from sobbing. I did not want a repeat. I needed to keep moving.
She’d said she wanted my help in ending her life. She was dying; it was a matter of time. She wanted to decide when that time was. Her family would move on only when she was gone, so it had to be done. She’d brought them all the way here. They now had to go on without her. She couldn’t wait for death to arrive naturally. She’d had enough with the not knowing, enough with the waiting. Ever since the war in Syria started, she’d had no control over her life or that of her family. God, Fate, bombs, the government, Assad, the disease, Daesh, little boys with machine guns and a few hairs sprouting on their faces that she could have removed with a good scrubbing, everything and everyone had more control over what happened to her. She’d had it. Enough. She wanted autonomy.
“That sounds clear to me,” Mazen said.
Emma took in a long breath, exhaled. “To me too,” Emma said. “But please don’t ask me to help you. I don’t think I could deal with it. I believe in the right to end one’s life, but I don’t want to be the one who does it.”
“I’ll help,” Mazen said.
“I’m grateful to both of you,” I said. “If I decide to, I’m able do it on my own.” I tried a joke to lift the mood. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” Neither of them found it funny.
Emma said she wouldn’t join us for lunch. She’d try to convince George to get back into bed.
“You’ve made the decision, haven’t you?” she said.
“I told Sumaiya I had to think about it,” I said.
How to Live in Chaos, According to Your Aunt
The four of us were back at the Greek restaurant of the night before, still complaining about the food. Closer to the kitchen, we could watch the cook cutting carrots into coins and hear her humming a tune to herself. Rasheed made some joke about promising not to take you to the port after lunch. I was dragged into the conversation, couldn’t stay within my tumbling thoughts of Sumaiya. When the grilled red mullet arrived, Mazen made a small plate of it with lemon and olive oil, adding a half clove of garlic and a pinch of salt. Fishing a small piece with a bit of bread, he brought it to your lips, and you nibbled meekly and gratefully from his proffered hand.
Mazen then asked the question that had been on my mind. “Do you know why you found this trip overwhelming since you’ve worked with refugees for so long? Is the suffering of the Syrians here more pronounced than for those you talked with before?”
No, not at all, you said, on the contrary. The refugees you met in Lebanon regaled you with much more horrifying tales, their destitution was much worse. In the haphazard camps of the mountains, the situation of the Syrians was more untenable. Interviewing the child beggars on the streets of Beirut left you horror-stricken. No, you weren’t exactly sure why this trip broke you. Maybe when you returned to your psychiatrist’s couch, you might be able to disentangle some of the threads of this noose. You had some ideas, but you weren’t sure.
“When I talked to people in Lebanon,” you said, “I was always the writer. I did the interviews officially. I would go around with a handler from UNHCR, and she would introduce me as a writer of some significance. There was a barricade between the person I was talking to and me. I could hear the stories, and no matter how sickening they were, I felt protected. I was able to listen dispassionately, impersonally. They were stories, after all, simply stories. I deal with stories all the time. I haven’t been able to do that here. Metaphor seems useless now, storytelling impotent.”
Rasheed suggested you work with his group, and he would introduce you as whatever made you comfortable, the writer, the king of Siam, Robert De Niro, anything.
You felt lost on the first day you landed, you said. You sat next to a Utahn on the small jet from Athens; the Rockies were in his clothes: the khakis, the plaid flannel shirt, the day-hiking boots. A garrulous Mormon who wouldn’t take the hint of the open book on your lap. He had to tell you how much seeing the suffering on television had affected him, how horrible he felt, how he started having uncomfortable dreams about drowning, a sign from his God if there ever was one. His doctor upped his lorazepam dosage because Xanax was no longer as effective. He couldn’t consume his food with the same relish he did before the refugee crisis. He had to do something to get his life back in balance.
Rasheed thought he recognized the Mormon. He’d met him briefly a couple of days earlier, good guy, a bit ignorant. Rasheed said he didn’t care what brought him or selfie-girl or the college kids to the island; he could put them to work.
You had come from Beirut, you said, and the Mormon forced you to switch to American mode sooner than you’d expected. You hadn’t realized that you were still that split—discrete entities not quite melted in the pot, Lebanese and American, still an immigrant after all these years—until you came across a large group of Middle Easterners while driving from the airport to Skala Sikamineas. They looked odd, a group of twenty-five or so, haphazardly spread out. You had to veer around those who sat on the bitumen. How could they not realize that they might be run over? You hadn’t expected to encounter refugees so soon, little more than an hour after you landed, after you’d extracted yourself from Mormon clutches. You turned your car around, drove back to them, lowered your window, and asked if they needed help. Please, said a man in his forties in English as he approached your car. Police, he said. Where is police? Not Syrian, he was Iranian. You informed him that you spoke Arabic if anybody in his group did. He gestured to an older woman sitting on a garbage bag of belongings. She stood up and you were taken aback. Your aunt who had died some thirty years earlier walked toward you. Uncanny resemblance, the cut of the gray hair, the dress and its colors, the swing of the arms as she walked. You couldn’t help but stutter your greeting. She explained that they needed to talk to the police; that was what they were told by the Turkish smugglers. They had expected someone to be there at the beach, but they might have landed on the wrong one. Where was the police?
You were a child once more, trying to explain to your aunt that you didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t your fault. You had been in Lesbos for no more than an hour. They should register at a police station, but you had no idea where one was. You got out of your car and told her you would look for one on your phone.
A boy of about thirteen with underwear-showing jeans and upright hair that accentuated long black eyelashes approached you. He, too, looked as if he were related to you. Before any exchange of greetings, he told you he understood that a Mercedes-Benz was the most expensive car in the world, but where he came from there were lots of old ones that worked as taxicabs. You told him it was similar in Beirut. You tried to make him feel at ease. Wasn’t that sweet, you thought, a boy and his obsession with cars. He delicately unwrapped a piece of cloth he was holding, from which he removed a Mercedes hood ornament, one that had been rubbed assiduously until it had a sparkling sheen. He told you he was hoping to sell the ornaments to fund his schooling, but he wanted you to know that he did not steal them. He’d gone to a junkyard and paid the equivalent of five dollars for a dozen of them. The owner of the yard told him he’d be able to make a fortune on them once he crossed into Europe. Could you help him sell one, because he was starving and needed to buy food?
You didn’t get the chance to do anything. Two young volunteers in a gray Jeep who happened to be driving by slowed down to demand in broken English that you get off the road. You realized that you were now standing next to the boy and your almost aunt in the middle of the road and had not thought of parking your car but had left it where you stopped, blocking traffic, you Lebanese you. You got back into the car to park it, and the volunteers took over. They called for a bus and organized the group into small family units to wait. By the time you rejoined them, one of the volunteers, his left arm browned from hanging out many a car window, wanted you to berate your aunt in her own language, wanted you to tell her in no uncertain terms that she should not allow herself or her children to wander onto the road, let alone settle on it. You were being hissed at, not spoken to. He wanted you to tell her that she would save a lot of time if she were better organized. She was no longer in chaos, he wanted you to explain.
You stood before your aunt and weren’t able to say a word. You weren’t a child who didn’t know what to do. You were her age.
You looked rather pitiful telling the story. We could barely hear you. Your voice would have been audible enough, but you wouldn’t look at us. You kept your head lowered, your neck bent at an awkward angle, like a bird preening its feathers. You appeared to be speaking to the improperly herbed cheese in the clay dish on the table in front of you.
You had trouble with the volunteers, you said, both the temporary and the NGOs. Not just those at the first meeting on the road, everybody. You loathed their selfies, their self-flattery, their patronizing righteousness, their callous self-regard, everything. And then you felt guilty for hating. You said you knew that in some way they were the best humanity had to offer. College kids were spending their holidays helping people instead of vacationing somewhere or, worse, interning for an evil corporation, but still, you resented much about them. You felt they had all the wrong reasons for coming to the island. They wanted to help in order to feel better about themselves, both the “Look at me, I’m the kind of person who helps refugees” kind of better and the “My life might suck, but yours sucks even more” kind.
You weren’t any better, you said. You couldn’t even do disaster tourism well. You came to a crisis area but ended up locking yourself in a hotel room, hiding from the people you had wanted to help.
You told us many things, but even though you would later try to convince me otherwise, you said nothing about panic attacks at that lunch. Do you think I would have let you off without getting you help or medicating you had I known at the time? No, telling us that you were overwhelmed and hid in your hotel room listening to opera was not the same thing as telling us you were having panic attacks. Paranoid fears, racing heart, fainting? Do you think I would have allowed you to drive had I known? By the time we met, you were doing better, but really, how stupid could you be?
Diomedes in the Congo
A year after your Lesbos trip, after multiple sessions sprawled on your analyst’s couch, the picture of what happened to you would not become discernibly clearer. You were able to find more reasons as to why you were uncomfortable (you couldn’t figure out which side of the divide you belonged on, your ambivalent feelings toward both volunteers and refugees), but those could not explain the abject terror that caused your withdrawal. What happened would remain a mystery.
You write your best work in mystery, however. You may not have understood much, but you ended up writing one of my favorite stories, “Diomedes in the Congo,” the most self-eviscerating thing you’d penned. You transformed the onetime king of Argos and leader of the Greeks during the Trojan War into Diomedes, Dio for short, a Greek American mercenary fighting in the Congo. Pallas Athena still looked after him, though she no longer needed to make a stream of fire flare from his shield and helmet. His AK-47 could do that well enough. Similar to what occurred in the Iliad, the goddess offered her warrior special vision, allowing him to see the gods active in the war. He was able to see Dick Cheney fighting alongside mercenaries, Steve Jobs making sure his soldiers protected the copper mines with religious zeal, Muammar Gaddafi bringing the Pan-African troops into battle. Billy Graham and Ayatollah Khomeini danced a sensual milonga together, one slipping Bibles into pockets, the other Qur’ans. Your mercenary saw them all and could not bear it. Nothing was what it seemed. Humans were being directed by the whims of the gods. Poor Diomedes, had his vision been restricted to the gods of war and evil, he would not have been as traumatized. When he encountered the humanitarian relief efforts that accompany every war, he saw the activities of the gods of altruism, many of whom were known by one name. Some people were led to Africa by Bono, others by Oprah. Madonna exhorted the war baby adopters, onward Christian soldiers, and Demi’s denizens tried to fight hunger.
Throughout the ages, humans have been warned against looking at the gods directly. None could look at the face of a god and remain sighted. Diomedes was blinded as soon as he saw the faces of the gods that directed his life, those to whom he had sold his soul.
In the Iliad, Athena warned her protégé to interfere with no god except Aphrodite, winner of Paris’s apple. He should smite her if the opportunity arose, and arise it most certainly did when the king of Argos wounded Aphrodite. In your story, blind Diomedes mistook Angelina Jolie for Sally Struthers, his intended victim, and killed her. The murder of Angelina so horrified the people that they tore poor Diomedes to pieces.
How to Guide a Boy into Becoming a Man with Cognac
My insomnia courted cognac. I sipped Rémy Martin from the bathroom sink glass, which made my drinking at that hour seem wrong somehow, more illicit. My father used to say that cognac was the best remedy for insomnia, not that it would help you sleep, but rather it would make you enjoy being awake quite a bit more. I surprised myself still by how much I missed him. We were unable to understand each other, and he would not approve of the choices I made, but unlike my mother, he was a decent human being and would have wanted the best for me, whatever that meant.
I was eleven when my parents decided to have that horror of a talk with me. I sat on their bedroom taboret facing them on the edge of the bed, the vanity mirror at my back. They should have been able to see my front and back, to see me whole, to see my truth, so to speak. I was only able see their fronts, since as every religion tells us, demons have no back, only what they wish to present to us, false fear or beguiling dazzle. To this day, I can still picture the bedroom in my head as if I saw it yesterday, all cherry and blond pine, the vanity, the nightstands, the headboard. My mother’s bed was always tightly made, of course. Nothing out of place, the room assaultingly neat and ordered. A flyswatter crucified on a small hook on the wall on her side of the bed, above a box of tissues and a stack of gossip magazines, both foreign and domestic, which I was not allowed to touch. There used to be an imaginary police cordon beginning at the bottom edge of the bed, beyond which we children were not allowed. The bottom of the bed was the limit. We couldn’t go farther. What crimes were committed we couldn’t investigate.
I sat on the taboret facing my mother and father. She, tight and mute, cleaved to his side, her face pinched. I must become a man, he said in a weighty tone. Did I want everyone to know what I was? Did I? I wanted to ask what I was, but I felt something shatter inside my head. I would spend my nights staring at an ocean of palpable darkness, wondering if anyone knew who I was, if anyone could see me.
My father, in a kind yet unequivocal tone, proceeded to trace the borders I was not to cross. In private, when I got older, I could do what I wanted, but discreetly, he said. In private, eat according to your taste, but in public, behave according to the public’s. It was his fault, my father said. He w
asn’t spending enough time with me. I was learning the wrong lessons. Boys like me needed guidance to grow into men like him—guidance and direction and a clear map. Until I matured and learned, I must watch my behavior and he would watch me.
Well, he didn’t for long. In the blink of an eye—or after an eternity had passed—I grew older and found myself elsewhere, in a land where sunrises were more solid and people less so, a world made of paper and shadows, away from him, from her, from them, cast out of the Garden.
Yes, I was older now. I was doing what I wanted, which was to drink cognac at two in the morning. I had an inexplicable fondness for minibars and their mini bottles. I didn’t dare turn my laptop on and disturb the darkness. Mazen treasured his sleep. I had to do everything quietly. I would have loved to go for a walk in the black of night, air out my musty anxieties, but I didn’t think I could get dressed without waking my brother. I couldn’t begrudge his making the offer to the newlyweds, but I did wish he were in his own room. My thoughts could spread out, loiter, and loll much more easily when I was alone.
“You can’t sleep?” I heard him say in a sleepy voice.
“I am asleep,” I said. “You’re dreaming.”
Once more, he laughed at an unfunny joke we’d had going for over fifty years. His laughter delighted me. Mine followed suit. Cackle, cackle. He was the wave and I its spray.
“Well, I’m up now,” he said.
“Go back to sleep.”
He was definitely awake now. I didn’t know anyone who could leap from the innocence of sleep to wakefulness as quickly as he.
The window rattled softly, anticipating another storm. The fake creeping fig next to it quivered in its pot, plastic leaves rustling. I tried closing the window more firmly but was unable to make it budge.