Jokes for the Gunmen

by Mazen Maarouf

  The flowers he was carrying were also white. ‘She must love white,’ he said. She might even stick one of them in her boot.

  Hossam went up to the girl, said, ‘I apologize,’ and offered her the flowers. The girl was surprised, or maybe she pretended to be surprised. When she asked him why he was apologizing, he said, ‘Didn’t you dream about me last night?’

  ‘Sorry? Why would I dream about you? Do I even know you?’

  ‘No, but you dreamed about me,’ he replied.

  Then Hossam started to get agitated and more aggressive. Passers-by gathered around him. It was like a scene from Candid Camera. People were smiling and looking at the buildings to find the hidden camera. ‘This girl dreamed about me last night,’ said Hossam. ‘I’m sure of it. Ask her. It was just a few hours ago and now she’s trying to pretend I’m nothing to do with her. What nonsense!’ But the girl wasn’t lying. She really didn’t recognize him.

  ‘Liar! Liar!’ Hossam started shouting. Then he threw the flowers on the ground and trampled on them. ‘I hope your flowers burn in hell,’ he said.

  He ended up in the police station and almost lost his job.

  I fully agree that Hossam wasn’t responsible for his problems.

  Sometimes he dreamed that he was a pressing human need. I remember him telling me how he saw himself in a dream as a pair of glasses hanging on the branch of a tree. The glasses belonged to a little boy who was crying beneath the tree. The little boy was the main character, since he was sitting in the dream director’s chair. But he didn’t do anything. The boy was lazy. Very lazy, in fact, because the branch wasn’t that high. ‘What was he waiting for? For an earthquake to happen and the glasses to fall and save the situation?’

  Hossam’s absolutely worst dream was when he saw himself as a piece of dog shit on the pavement. He couldn’t do anything about it. ‘I couldn’t jump off somewhere or even crawl. I was firmly stuck to the ground. And I was sweating. I must have been a fresh piece of shit, a piece of shit that had just come out. But from where I was, I couldn’t see a dog nearby. I thought I would never get out of this dream and would spend the rest of my life as a piece of shit on the pavement. A few minutes later war broke out, and it was a vicious war, with RPGs and machine guns. There was an invasion, with armed men taking up their positions.’

  While he was looking for the dream director, who wasn’t visible anywhere, Hossam saw an army boot, which landed on him and lifted him up off the pavement. ‘Hey, man, imagine you’re the piece of shit that’s stuck to the boot of a gunman during what appears to be an attack. While his comrades move forward according to the plan, the gunman stops and tries to get you off his boot because the smell’s interfering with his concentration. He rubs you against the pavement and starts cursing the guts that produced you. Moments later he realizes that he’s a target. No one’s covering him and his comrades have moved ahead, either because the smell is so strong or for strategic reasons determined by how long the attack is expected to last. Then he starts shooting to protect himself. He’s scraping his boot to get the shit off and firing his rifle at the same time. At random, of course. Except he took a bullet or two in his leg, and then in his hip. Blood flowed, soaked his combat trousers, ran down into his boot and then touched me. Because of the blood, I fell off the boot, but I was still wet with that gunman’s blood.’

  Not all his dreams were frightening. Once he saw himself as a kiss. Hossam wasn’t the lips that shared the kiss. ‘I was the kiss itself. I don’t know how to explain that. I was just a feeling in the dream.’

  The people who took on the role of film director in his dreams might be Hossam’s neighbours, or sometimes members of his family. Even his former wife. I had spoken to some of them at the police station or the hospital. They assured me that, to their surprise, what Hossam said about their dreams was one hundred per cent true. Some people were going to file a complaint against Hossam in court – they didn’t want Hossam holding them responsible for their dreams.

  All Hossam could do was wait for the main character in his dream to wake up and open their eyes. At that point Hossam would wake up too, shaking off the blanket irritably and cursing the person in whose dream he’d found himself. He would put on his dressing gown and his sandals and, straight out of bed, without washing or even combing his hair, he’d head over to his neighbour’s. He’d knock on the door. The neighbour was caught off guard when Hossam jumped in with his question: ‘Can you tell me what you dreamed about last night?’

  Hossam wasn’t on close terms with any of his neighbours. His relationship with them was distant. So it was odd for him to ask them directly about their dream when he had never had a proper conversation with them. They wouldn’t talk about their dream, so Hossam told them his version. They were surprised. Hossam took advantage of their surprise to lay into them with his fists, shouting, ‘This is a violation of privacy. This is a violation of privacy.’ Sometimes he would take the day off work and go by bus to settle a score with some dreamer.

  He tried all kinds of ways to avoid other people’s dreams, but none of them worked. In the end he joined a shooting club, in the hope that he might transfer his new skills to other people’s dreams and kill them by mistake. ‘Mistakes do happen, even in dreams, don’t they?’ he said.

  Although he didn’t yet have a gun licence, he managed to buy a Colt revolver and he carried it around with him wherever he went, to the supermarket or to work. Even when he went to bed, he stuffed it behind his back in the hope that it would go into his dream with him. ‘Do you sleep with the revolver on your hip?’ I asked him. When he said yes, I was dismayed. I was worried he might use it against one of the people he dreamed about.

  When he couldn’t recognize the person in whose dream he was, he’d call me in a nervous state. He started having suspicions about everyone, including me. ‘Why isn’t the dreamer someone I know? Why not you, for example?’

  ‘Me?’ I said in a panic, glancing at the glint of the silver revolver. ‘Definitely not. Not me. Upon my honour. I’ve never seen you in any of my dreams. What’s come over you? Aren’t we friends?’

  In his room you could find rough sketches of the people who’d dreamed about Hossam and whom he’d never seen in real life. He became obsessed with hunting them down, even if it took him the rest of his life. ‘Why do people you don’t know, that you’ve never seen, drag you into their dreams? What do they want from you?’ he asked.

  His mental state was deteriorating and I couldn’t do anything to help him. It bothered me. I became frightened of him. What if Hossam appeared in a minor role in one of my dreams, without me being able to tell? I knew he was counting on me to give him the main role in one of my dreams. At least in one dream. But he never said that overtly.

  I avoided seeing him or keeping in touch with him. I didn’t want to risk it. What if I had dreamed about him and I couldn’t remember? And when I mistreated something in a dream, I worried that the thing might in fact be Hossam. I was tense, and he would ask me enthusiastically, ‘So tell me, are you suffering from other-people’s-dreams syndrome too?’

  ‘No. Not yet,’ I said.

  Then the end came when he found himself in a dream about a boy with a mental disability. He was the son of some neighbours, an old couple who hadn’t had any other children. His mind had stopped developing when he was three years old. Now he was as old as an adult but he had the mind of a child. His parents grew older. Hossam had never imagined he would end up in this boy’s dream, but that’s what happened.

  The boy was sitting in the dream director’s chair. He was giving instructions, none of which Hossam understood, but he did allow Hossam to bring his revolver with him. Hossam was chasing his ex-wife in front of the boy. His wife hadn’t had any children. Hossam fired at her but didn’t hit her. What happened was that the bullet hit the boy by mistake, near his waist. Hossam woke up in a panic and called me immediately. ‘I’ve shot the disabled boy and killed him,’ he said, ‘but it happened by accident.�
�� He was speaking as though this had really happened. I calmed him down and we agreed to meet for a coffee in a cafe. I waited for Hossam for about thirty minutes before he finally came. It wasn’t his practice to be late. On the contrary, after every bad dream he’d had, I’d usually find that he had beaten me to the coffee shop and was sitting there nervously. When he finally arrived, his face had turned yellow, as if someone had urinated on him. ‘What’s up now?’ I asked him, as if I were asking a spoiled child. ‘The boy really has died. I heard his parents weeping. He woke up with horrible pains in his kidneys and was groaning loudly, and the parents, who move slowly because of their age, couldn’t do anything for him. He soon died. He died because I shot him. In the dream the bullet lodged near his waist.’

  I tried to convince him that this was impossible. A bullet he had fired in a dream couldn’t lead to the boy really dying. Then he handed himself in at the police station, but they didn’t take a statement from him. Instead, they referred him to a hospital that specializes in mental and nervous disorders. I had to escort him and sign the papers for his admission and tell them how long he planned to stay.

  In the hospital Hossam became good friends with the other inmates. They were always hovering around him and he no longer complained about the dreams. In fact he liked the mental patients’ dreams. Then he asked me to smuggle in the Colt revolver for him. ‘Impossible,’ I said. ‘Are you planning to commit a crime?’

  ‘No. For days I’ve been dreaming about myself. About me. I found myself as a child, a little child dreaming about me. Do you get what I mean? I’m two people in the dream – the child I was in the past and the grown-up man you’re talking to now. I don’t know which of the two is the extra in the life of the other, the adult or the child. But what’s certain is that it’s the child that’s dreaming, and not me.’

  ‘And what do you plan to do with the revolver?’ I asked him.

  ‘I’m going to shoot the boy dead. Just as I did with the son of the old couple. And since the boy will die, he won’t wake up, which means that I won’t leave the dream. I’ll supervise his funeral in the dream.’

  ‘That’s enough, Hossam. Enough. You have to get out of this vicious circle, or whatever you call it. Do you think I believe you? I’m fed up.’ That was the last thing I said to him. Hossam looked relieved. As I left the hospital I heard him laughing. He had understood.

  Hossam kept dreaming about both himself and the boy he had been. And I didn’t smuggle in the Colt revolver for him. So he didn’t use a revolver in the dream – he used a knife. A fellow patient had provided him with it. Hossam took the knife and slowly advanced towards Hossam the child, who was sitting in the dream director’s chair, saying, ‘I don’t like this.’ He was holding a bag of tangerines but he hadn’t yet had a chance to taste one. Hossam came up to him, stuck his hand in the bag and took out a tangerine. With his other hand he planted the knife in the boy’s neck. The boy shuddered like a hen that’s had hot water poured on it, then fell off the chair, dead, without having a chance to wake up from the dream. Meanwhile everyone else in the dream took flight and they probably all woke up from their dreams at that moment. This is exactly what happened. Literally. I assure you. I know all the details: the lighting, how the child gasped for breath and gave up the ghost, even the colour of the knife handle. I know everything. Everything. Even the taste of the tangerines in the bag – I know it well. Because I was there.

  Aquarium

  WE CALLED HIM MUNIR, BUT HE WAS NO MORE than a lump of clotted blood in her womb. The doctor decided that it was a pregnancy. This was supported by the fact that my fiancée’s stomach was swollen, she hadn’t had her period, and she had pains in her ovaries. The swelling in her stomach wasn’t really the result of a pregnancy, however. It was an inflammation caused by the interaction of several birth-control pills. Three times in succession, for example, she had taken ‘morning after’ pills, each of which cost thirty dollars.

  We hadn’t known each other long and we hadn’t intended to have sex so soon. But sex saved our relationship. My fiancée insisted I show her my penis. She loved me very much but she was worried my penis might not be thick enough. She wasn’t interested in the length, only in the girth. ‘If it’s thin, I won’t be able to marry you,’ she said. So my penis, and not my feelings, had the final say in our relationship. We were in the car and we stopped on the motorway. The street lamps were either burned out or turned off. In the car it wasn’t possible to turn on the little ceiling light, and since my fiancée couldn’t see my penis, she started groping it with her hand. Then she said, ‘I think it’s shaped like a kind of mushroom.’ For a moment I didn’t know whether this was a criticism of my penis, or praise. But she didn’t give me a chance to ask. She pounced on it with her mouth, which took me by surprise and made me ejaculate. So we argued. My fiancée got out of the car, hailed a taxi and drove off. Then she sent me a text message saying, ‘It’s all over between us. Our relationship ended as quickly as you ejaculated.’ I had to persuade her to try again. ‘In bed things will be different,’ I wrote to her, and so they were.

  We had sex to save our emotional relationship. Daily for ten days. On each of the first three days my fiancée took a ‘morning after’ pill. Later she told me about a British lover of hers who had a very thin penis. ‘It was as thin as a Bic biro,’ she said. He used two of his fingers to supplement his penis. He wrapped them around his penis and put them in with it. My wife thought he had inserted a screw made of flesh and blood between her thighs. Every time he’d change the two fingers. He was well-practised at that. Sometimes he would cry. He’d stop having sex suddenly and go into a long monologue about how he wished he could have a thicker penis, so he wouldn’t need to use his fingers. She told me he had volunteered to work with some humanitarian organization in Iraq and she no longer knew anything about him.

  Munir wasn’t a modern name. My fiancée and I knew that. We chose it initially as a joke, in the hope that the foetus was male. Then we believed it was male. The personality of the lump of gooey blood was male – that’s what we decided. Then our relationship with him developed, so much so that sometimes I would wake up in the night to massage my fiancée’s stomach with circular clockwise movements. Just to make sure that Munir was settled peacefully. But I wasn’t aware I was doing this. In the morning, as soon as she woke up, my fiancée would hug me and say, ‘Thank you, my dear.’ And I would ask, ‘For what?’ ‘For being such a good father,’ she replied. Then I realized I had been sleepwalking. It didn’t happen just the once – it recurred five or six times, until I started taking half a tablet of Lexotanil so that I didn’t wake up during the night to touch Munir.

  My fiancée concluded that I wouldn’t be a good husband unless I sleepwalked. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you raised the children – all our children – when you’re sleepwalking,’ she joked. I didn’t like the joke at the time. But now that some years have passed, I’d be more than willing to look after all our children while sleepwalking – I mean our children that have never come, and will never come.

  Munir, that lump of clotted blood, wasn’t destined to survive. We had to get him out of my fiancée’s womb one day before the wedding. That was because his presence had caused her stomach to swell, which would have been seen as a scandal. But we hesitated. We argued often. The doctor herself wasn’t sure whether the mysterious lump was a foetus or just clotted blood. My fiancée thought we had no right to remove a child from its place of residence. ‘A child?’ I said scornfully. ‘At the moment it’s no more important than the blood in a nosebleed or the blood that comes with piles.’

  We sought the advice of a group of married friends, but none of them had experience of such a mystery in a womb. But the doctor settled the matter with a phone call, at eleven o’clock in the evening. ‘I won’t take responsibility,’ she said angrily. ‘If it sticks to the wall of the womb it might cause cancer.’ Then she hung up.

  That night I didn’t take any Lexotanil, and indeed th
e next morning my fiancée told me, as we were getting dressed to go to the hospital, that I had got up during the night, sleepwalking of course, and had started massaging her stomach with circular movements. ‘You even cried,’ she added. I argued with her, saying, ‘I’m going to ask you one question: do you enjoy having sex with me?’ I interrupted her as she nodded her head: ‘I enjoy it too – I love it. There’ll definitely be another Munir, and we’ll call him Munir, and I say that quite seriously.’

  We kept Munir in a test tube. When I looked at him in the test tube the first time, I had a feeling he was exhausted. That was straight after the operation. During the operation the doctor couldn’t contain her emotion when she scraped the clot of blood out of my fiancée’s womb. She said a little ‘yes’ and her eyes filled with tears, confident that what lay on the scalpel in front of her was not a foetus. As she handed the test tube to us, she said, ‘It’s just a clot of blood. You can get rid of it however you see fit. Have a good look at it, just to be sure.’ To be honest, I couldn’t tell the difference. In the very earliest stages of its development you can tell a foetus from a blood clot only by feeling, and my feeling was that this solid clot of blood in the test tube was Munir. But I didn’t say anything to my fiancée. I was bitterly disappointed. She, on the other hand, closed her eyes, fell asleep in the front seat of the car and didn’t utter a word. I tucked the test tube into the glovebox where we keep CDs, turned the key in the ignition, and off we drove.