by Rawi Hage
I hadn’t heard from Otto for many months. One morning, as I was about to park my car in the garage, I saw him standing on the sidewalk in front of the building. He was smoking and had a foam cup of coffee in his hand. I parked my car and went to him. I stood there and tried to engage him a bit longer, thinking I might catch Zainab on her way down, but he walked towards the entrance and took the stairs up and I followed. He breathed heavily, he looked hunched and fatter, and his leather jacket moved in gigantic forms against the light of the stair’s windows as we moved between the floors. A faint smell of food rose from a neighbour’s apartment. I immediately thought of hunger, it must have been hunger that was causing Otto’s slowness, because when Otto was down before, he would go through weeks of drinking hard liquor and eating one meal a day, or sometimes only peanuts in the morning.
He sat at the kitchen table, and when I offered him food, he asked for a glass of water. He pulled out some pills and swallowed them.
Talk, I said, and he told me the story of his incarceration.
BARREL
I AM BLEEDING, Otto said, as he sat on a chair in the police station.
Name?
Langston.
Real name.
Stokely.
Real name.
Carmichael.
Real name, one of the officers said, and he pushed a paper and a pen towards Otto.
I can’t write.
Real name, he repeated. Write down your fucking real name, because I know who you are. So just write down your fucking name. I have your file. It’s been a while, but I see you are making a comeback. Kind of like those Motown singers, and the officer looked at his partner and they both smiled. Now write down your name.
Otto wrote down Stokely Carmichael.
Your real name.
Black.
Look, Bob, he wrote “Black,” but he looks a little pale to me. I wonder how that happened. It must have been his great-great-grandmother holding on to that white boy’s ass in the barn and not letting him pull out in time. Now, real name, motherfucker . . .
Panther Fist, Otto wrote.
I’ll ask you again, write down your real name.
God.
One more chance, chocolate-milk boy, the officer said.
A Fuck you appeared on the paper.
Otto was pushed out of his chair. One police officer watched while the other beat him with his stick. After a while the second officer came over and started kicking Otto and stomping on him.
Otto started to shout, I am God, motherfuckers! That is my real name. My name is fucking God.
The first officer smiled and said, The man needs help. He thinks he is God.
They left the room and Otto was left on the cold floor, his head hurting, his body still. He closed his eyes and lost track of time.
LATER, TWO MEN in green aprons came to see Otto in the interrogation room. They said they were there to accompany him. When he asked where they were taking him, one of the men spoke to him softly and sounded very professional.
Sir, I have to inform you that you are now in our custody and that your safety and well-being have been assigned to us and are out of police hands. We ask you to cooperate and make it easy for everyone. You will be driven to a psychiatric ward for assessment. In the event of non-compliance on your part, we might have to employ restraining measures. Now I want you to answer me with a simple yes or no. Sir, do you understand what I’ve just told you?
Otto laughed and didn’t answer.
Sir, the man said, you have to answer me, because if you refuse to cooperate, we might just have to restrain you.
Otto looked across the room and saw one of the officers who had beaten him standing in the back with a file folder in his hand. The officer looked indifferent and kept his eyes on the table pretending not to hear, but Otto knew that the officer was listening and Otto felt alone.
Are you seriously taking me to a mental hospital? he said.
Sir, do you understand what I just told you, yes or no.
Otto nodded and the officer approached the orderly and gave him the file.
IN THE BACK seat of the car Otto was squeezed between the two men. He was silent and never said a word.
When they arrived he was led down a hallway and into a room. The room had no windows; it had a metal bed and a chair in the corner and nothing else.
A nurse came to Otto and handed him a hospital gown.
Take off your clothes and put on the gown. The doctor will come for you.
I don’t need a doctor, he said, but before he had a chance to say anything more, the woman left and locked the door behind her.
Otto refused to stretch himself out on the bed. That, he thought, would constitute an admission of a pathological state. So he went to the chair in the corner and sat. Then he realized that he was thirsty. He banged on the door and a few seconds later the same nurse opened it and said, You better keep it down.
I need water, I am thirsty.
She closed the door and a few seconds later opened it again, and Otto stood there with a paper cup in his hand and drank. When he was done, the nurse took the paper cup away.
In the room Otto’s mind wandered. He talked to Aisha and offered her a larger pillow, he asked her if he should bring the bed up or call the nurse, he told her to be patient until the doctor came back, he promised to smuggle hash into the hospital, he thought it might relieve her nausea. And then he felt like weeping, but that might also be an indictment of madness, he thought.
He had been stripped of everything, but it was the metal bed that he loathed and feared the most. He wished he had some alcohol, or company, or a book. Most of all he longed for Aisha, to see her lying on her favourite couch reading with the sun on her back, her round exposed thighs, her glances at him between pages, her grimaces of endearment and disapproval: at his singing, his loudness in the kitchen, his long rants about jazz and politics, his cursing in the mornings. Her childlike obsession with pages and words.
He thought about Aisha’s life, her childhood after the exodus of the white people to the suburbs for fear of property value depreciation when the blacks moved in. The only white person who stayed behind was Mrs. Rooney, a retired librarian and an avid reader. She decided to stay because, as she liked to say, she had enough love for everyone. I will die here, among the good people of this land, she’d say. All races are good by me. I don’t see why everyone is in such a rush to leave. With time, Mrs. Rooney started to lose her eyesight, and she relied on her good neighbours to bring her food and medicine.
One day, while Aisha was reciting her homework in the hallway, Mrs. Rooney invited her in. Sit down, child, and read to me, she said. You read so well. So every day Aisha would go to Mrs. Rooney and read to her and indulge in her cookies and sweets. And every once in a while Mrs. Rooney would hand Aisha some coins, which Aisha would keep hidden in her winter shoes in the summer and then switch to her summer shoes in the winter. A few seasons passed and then Mrs. Rooney’s nephew came and took the old lady to a nursing home; her sight had gotten worse and she’d almost burned down the building. The night before her departure, Mrs. Rooney called Aisha and said, Choose any book from my library and I will recite it to you. And Aisha chose a book and Mrs. Rooney started reciting it all by heart. Aisha was bewildered and sad. If you have them all in your head, she asked, why did you make me feel needed?
I just wanted you to read and cultivate a love for books, my child, the old lady said, and asked Aisha to come closer. I am giving away all my books to the library, Mrs. Rooney told her, all of them. I won’t give you any of my books, because now that you are a reader, you have to read your people’s books.
And then she gave Aisha a card and told her, When you reach the age of twenty-one, you call this number. My girl, I did leave something for you after all.
Aisha passed the age of twenty-one
and never called. She’d misplaced the card, and Mrs. Rooney seemed a thing of the past. One day, though, the lawyer for Mrs. Rooney’s estate telephoned and asked Aisha to come and visit him at his office. Mrs. Rooney had left her a humble cottage with a piece of land around it, and a modest amount of money.
When Aisha and Otto and I went our separate ways, they decided it was time to leave the neighbourhood. They moved to the cottage and stayed there for a few years. Aisha loved it. Seclusion suited her, and the cottage was distant from everything. They took long walks to the nearest village and carried the food home on their backs. In the summer, they sat under the large tree that shaded the cottage and cooled the breezes that passed by. Aisha would read and Otto would smoke pensively and curse the flies. In the winter, they used the metal stove that was in the middle of the room. They lived frugally on the little inheritance. The cottage was equipped with an axe and a shovel and all that was needed to survive a winter.
But after a while Otto got restless. They would go for days without encountering another person, and for weeks without receiving a single visitor. The ascetic life was too much for him to bear. Otto got a part-time job at the quarry. He would hitchhike with the lumber trucks and the few locals who by now knew of the black couple’s existence in the village. Then Aisha got sick and they had to go back to the city for treatment.
After months of agony, sickness, and the hospital’s miseries, Aisha whispered to Otto, It is over. Take me back to the cottage and bury me under that tree, away from these metal beds and crosses.
And that is what Otto did. When she died, he left her body lying in a makeshift bed for two nights and on the third day, he took the shovel and dug a hole under the tree and buried her. And then for the next seven days, he polished a large stone until it turned smooth and glossy. He set it at her grave and wrote on it: Here lies a reader and a fighter. He read her favourite poem and then he turned away from the grave. He closed the door of the cottage and walked back towards the city.
In his room in the psychiatric ward he tried to remember that poem. He remembered the original name of the poet but couldn’t remember the name he’d chosen later in his life. Everett LeRoi Jones, he repeated, yes, but what was the new name? An African name, yes, an African name. Maybe I should have changed my name, he thought. But I tried that, and those brutes didn’t believe me. Instead they put me in here. The poem, he thought. The poem, Aisha’s favourite poem:
Dull unwashed windows of eyes
and buildings of industry . . .
And then what, Otto said to himself, trying to remember. And then what . . . He fixed his eyes on the metal bed. Say it for me, darling, one more time . . . He was talking out loud, and he stopped himself. But then what, my love. Say it again, he whispered, turning his back to the door. Could someone read that poem to me? And again he heard his own voice and he hushed himself and moved the metal chair to muffle the spoken words.
After a few hours, Otto was still in the room in a hospital gown, and he was starting to feel the cold on his exposed legs and bare back. The woman had taken his clothes away. He thought about covering himself with the bedsheet, but to take the cover off the bed and wrap it around himself would only make him look like one of those hobos with no teeth, shivering around the barrel’s fire.
Finally, after many hours of solitude and sporadic monologues, the door opened and the nurse asked him to follow her.
He was led to another room, even more confining than the one he’d just left. The walls were utterly empty, but he did find some comfort in the wooden chair, which was warmer than the metal one in the previous room. He thought about the physics classes he’d taken as a teenager. Metal is a conductor, wood is a receptor. And for a moment he felt like assuming the theatricality of madness. To climb up onto the table and conduct an orchestra, singing, Metal is a conductor, wood is a receptor, metal is a conductor . . .
He stayed on the chair and extended his legs in the direction of the door. Cigarettes, he mumbled. His mind tried to trace the path of his belongings. Where might his plastic lighter and his pack of cigarettes be now? Had his things been transferred from the police station to the hospital? Small details such as these made him feel normal.
He tried to imagine what the assessment would be like. They’d be sure to ask about his childhood . . . yes, that predictable Freudian trick again. The death of his father and then the death of his mother. His white-trash suburban aunt, his mother’s sister, who’d hated his black father and wondered why her sister had married one of them, as she put it. And her slob of a husband, who’d sit there watching the game and make Otto and his younger brother Martin go to the store to fetch the beer . . . images of he and Martin with their suitcases, shuttled from one foster home to the next. And then Martin’s death. He’d joined the army and was killed in the line of duty, in what Otto called a useless death for the hegemony of an empire. His body was never found.
This interrogation, he thought, would be much like the last, in the police station, without the muscles this time, maybe, but with psychological arrogance and threats. His body was bruised but somehow he felt energized by it all. A good fight was always welcome. That was what he missed most after he and Aisha left the struggle and retreated into nature. But then he remembered what Aisha had told him before they quit: We can always come back. The world doesn’t change much. There will always be a just fight and a cause to die for.
And that is when the door opened and two people entered the room. Otto looked at their white teeth and wanted to burst out laughing, saying to himself, Shit, the non-smokers are here. He looked closely at their faces and saw a man in his late forties and a young blond, attractive woman. Judging by the way she held a pencil between her fingers and a pad close to her chest, she seemed all ready to take notes.
Hello, said the man. I am Dr. Wu, and this is Genevieve, an intern with us here. She will be joining us, if you don’t mind.
Otto didn’t respond.
So, how do you feel?
I would like a cigarette.
I don’t smoke. Ms. Genevieve, do you smoke?
The intern shook her head.
So I was looking at your file . . . but let me start by asking you some questions. These are standard questions that we ask all our patients. He glanced at the intern and she lowered her chin in agreement and paused her pencil.
Do you ever hear voices? Dr. Wu asked.
No, I don’t, Otto replied categorically.
Do you experience episodes? Let me explain: do you sometimes feel as if there is a separation between yourself and your environment?
No, I don’t.
Good. Do you at times think you belong to the realm of certain deities?
No.
Do you believe in God or in gods?
No, as a matter of fact, I am an atheist.
Interesting. Mr. . . . Blake, was it?
Otto.
Then do you think that you are God?
I just told you that I am an atheist: why would I believe that I don’t exist?
So how can you be sure that you do exist?
I could only be sure if I lit a cigarette between my lips and blew.
Mr. Blake, let’s discuss, chronologically, the series of events that brought you here.
I really would like a cigarette: it might hold off my hunger. I haven’t been offered any food since this morning. And I believe that might well constitute an infringement of a prisoner’s rights. How about that for a chronological event.
So you think you are a prisoner here?
I think you consider me as one, and you have certainly been treating me as one.
Not at all, Mr. . . . Otto. We are here to help. But to go back to our previous discussion, you did, at the police station, write on a piece of paper that your name was God. I have the paper with me right here. It is your handwriting, I believe?
I w
as being ironic.
Yes, I see. I believe you, but my concern now is the self-infliction situation.
You mean the beating.
The police report stated that when you were left on your own, you managed to hurt yourself.
I was beaten, man. I was beaten. I want to see a lawyer and I demand that my injuries be examined and matched to the pig’s stick. Do you hear me, Doctor? I was abused. Police brutality. Yet another case of police brutality. Now I won’t go on with this nonsense before I get a lawyer.
Well, Mr. Otto. I am sorry to hear that you won’t cooperate. You see, under the circumstances, we have to make sure of your mental well-being before we proceed to the judicial side of things.
Listen, you motherfucker, get me a lawyer now.
Okay, Mr. Otto. I think our session is done here. I will make sure you get your assigned meals and the needed sustenance.
And my cigarettes, Otto said, as the intern rushed to open the door and the doctor passed through.
A HUGE GIANT of a warden appeared and escorted Otto back to his room. A few minutes later, the nurse came with a small plastic cup in her hand. In the presence of the giant, she approached Otto. Suddenly, like a genie engulfed in smoke, the giant began to talk: This is your medicine. The doctor has prescribed it. You must take it three times a day. There is no compromise here. The medicine will be completely swallowed as instructed. I advise you not to try to avoid taking the medicine. The medicine should be fully swallowed in my presence. There is no margin for manoeuvring, sir. After the medicine has entered your mouth, I will ask you not to swallow it but to hold it on your tongue and open your mouth and stretch your tongue out so I can see the pill there. After you have done that, you are expected to immediately swallow it. Once the designated pills are swallowed, I will ask you again to open your mouth in order for me to examine it and be certain that the medicine was fully ingested. Please do not try to dodge or avoid taking the medicine because let me assure you, sir, we do have other means to ensure that the medicine’s benefits are fully exercised.