Guapa

  “Thank you for being the voice of your people,” the middle-aged man said, taking the megaphone from my hand.

  But I was fired up now. I wanted to stay and protest for as long as it took. I felt that if we were to give up now and go back home as individuals, then we would destroy the power of the collective we had created when we were united. But the drizzle quickly turned into a heavy downpour of freezing rain. We tried to take shelter under Leila’s polka-dot umbrella but my clothes were drenched through to my underwear.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Leila said. “I’m meeting up with some activist friends at a bar nearby. Do you want to come?”

  I nodded. I was up for anything that might delay the inevitable loneliness that would sink in when I got home.

  As we ran toward the bar, our soggy shoes smacking against the wet streets of the city, my phone began to ring. It was Cecile.

  “You were just on the news,” she squealed. “You were up on a podium chanting. I couldn’t believe it was you. They’re showing it everywhere!”

  I thought of Teta, and whether the footage of me would be broadcast on her television screen tomorrow morning. I’d get a telling off, for sure. But even if she was to chance upon the footage of me leading the chants, there was nothing she could do from over there. After all, I was resisting an imperialist invasion. What was she doing? Playing cards and watching the news, and as the war worsened her charity would not extend beyond heckling the television set.

  I had agency, I told myself. My boots burst dirty puddles on the street like I was crushing American invaders with every step. I had a voice goddammit. I wasn’t going to take any of this war business, or any of Teta’s eib business, any more.

  The bar was noisy and full of Arabs. They were Arabs, yes, but they looked unlike anyone else back home. None of the women had straightened their hair, choosing to leave it in a tangle of curls. The men all had unkempt beards and kaffiyehs wrapped around their shoulders. The atmosphere was buzzing, and I was riding the wave.

  We took a seat at the table where, among melted candles, packs of cigarettes, and half-drunk glasses of beer, heavy books were strewn. Books written by Noam Chomsky and Edward Said and Norman Finkelstein, chastising the wars and occupations. The activists spoke hurriedly of “drafting statements” and “building solidarity.” It was as if all I had read since arriving in America, about Marx and resistance and all that, was being played out here in the smoky haze of alcohol and debate. I felt comfortable enough to come out of my head and thoughts. The dizzying conversations reminded me of those parties my parents used to throw many years ago. I drank beer and flitted between discussions, catching snippets of heated debates and excitable whispers. My mind buzzed with theories and beer.

  “We must build more solidarity with Native Americans,” said one man with long curly hair, leaning into a pretty girl with black-framed glasses.

  “Arundhati Roy’s fiction is very problematic,” Leila explained to a group of younger women.

  “The statement shouldn’t make reference to the Zionist lobby’s pro-war memo. That just acknowledges and empowers them,” a tall man said, shaking a piece of paper.

  “You cannot single out one instance of oppression in the region without unpacking the whole system,” said a woman who was smoking a thinly rolled cigarette, her eyes the color of olives.

  “Are you telling me in all seriousness that the Quran is not anti-women?” came from another conversation that was taking place behind me. I turned around and saw a short, pear-shaped woman pointing her beer at a man with a bulbous nose.

  And just behind the man with the bulbous nose, sitting on a stool in a corner of the bar, among the group yet separate, was Sufyan. He stared thoughtfully into his half-drunk bottle of beer. He had cut his long, beautiful hair short and his beard was trimmed. The excitement of seeing him overwhelmed any other nervousness I had, and before I knew it I had walked up to him and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “What are the chances of seeing you here,” he said when he turned around. I studied his face. He seemed pleased to see me.

  “I’m just with some friends,” I said, enjoying how casually the sentence sounded. “I was at the protest but I didn’t see you.”

  “Well, it was only the biggest protest to have ever taken place in America, so …” He chuckled. He looked down at his drink, and I watched the way his delicate fingers traced loops around the mouth of the frosty bottle. “Actually I saw you on the podium, chanting in Arabic.”

  “Oh really?” I leaned in closer. “What did you think?”

  He smiled. “It was cool. Well they asked me to chant as well, you know …”

  The woman with olive eyes leaned into the conversation. “Yeah, but you can’t speak Arabic for shit. Pronouncing your eins like an American.” She laughed.

  Sufyan looked annoyed.

  “You cut your hair,” I said, changing the subject.

  “It was getting too long,” he replied, running a hand over his head.

  “Why are you sitting alone?”

  “I’m bored. I’m drunk. I want to leave. But I don’t want to go home.”

  “I’ve got some weed at my place, so …” The beer had given me a newfound courage. The possibility sparked in the air between us like lightning bolts of electricity.

  We said goodbye to the others and walked back to my studio. We were not talking much. The rain had stopped and the air seemed quiet and still after the excitement of the bar. Our footsteps echoed around us, filling in the silence.

  When I opened the door of my studio apartment, I took in the state of the room as if from Sufyan’s eyes. My jeans and T-shirts were strewn across the bed. A large ashtray with overflowing cigarette carcasses sat on top of a heavy stack of books that functioned as my bedside table. My poster of George Michael half hung on the wall, the edges beginning to droop. The sink was overflowing with dirty dishes and cups.

  “The clothes are clean,” I explained, pushing the T-shirts and jeans to one side. “I just didn’t have time to put them away. Have a seat.”

  Sufyan sat on the bed, his eyes taking in the contents of my room. I took a seat on the floor next to him and began to roll a joint.

  “Do you smoke often?” he asked.

  “Depends how bad the news is,” I said, licking the joint closed and offering it to him.

  “It’s been a while since I smoked,” he said, eyeing the joint. “I’m trying to be a better person, to get away from all this shit, but I guess tonight is as good a night as any to let go.” He lit the joint and inhaled deeply. A smile appeared on his face as he relaxed into the bed. I took two beers from the fridge and handed one to him.

  “Is your family affected by the war at all?” he asked suddenly.

  “We’re all affected in some way. The entire thing is very problematic,” I said, enjoying using the word for the first time. “Aren’t yours?”

  “If they are they don’t say so. These days my parents cling to American patriotism with an intensity bordering on paranoia. They feel that if they don’t, they might be kicked out or something,” he said and smiled.

  “What about you?” I asked. He was lying back on the bed now, staring at the ceiling. “Do you sometimes feel alienated from it all? That’s how I feel sometimes. I feel stuck between everything. Sometimes I feel that I don’t want to be Arab anymore. It is causing me too many problems. Instead I wish I were a cloud. I mean that. Or a bird, so I could opt out of all this, this history of our people.”

  He leaned up on his elbow and looked me in the eye.

  “Me? I’m fucking sick of the hypocrisy of white liberals.” He paused, as if to consider how he might appear having said this, and then seemingly pleased with himself, lay back on the bed with one arm against his forehead and continued to stare at that ceiling, which seemed to fascinate him so much.

  Meanwhile, my attention drifted to his feet. Well, one foot in particular, which hovered shoeless a few inches away from my face. I examined the
contours of that foot, the shape his toes made through the gray cotton socks. I caught a whiff of them. They smelled of laundry detergent and a day’s worth of walking. The scent awakened an urge in me. I wanted to get close to his feet. I felt the smell would soothe something in me, somehow. I leaned my head in to catch more of the scent. I breathed in deeply. The smell traveled inside me, making my head feel airy and my fingers tingle, awakening more of that hunger. I felt scared. How deep would I have to go? How much of this smell would I have to take in to satisfy these feelings? Or would my cravings grow the more I fed them?

  “Everywhere I look there is violence,” Sufyan continued, distracting me from his foot. I looked up at him. Both arms were behind his head now as he stared at the ceiling, but he kept his foot inches from my face. “It seems to be a competition over who can upload and send out the most violent images. Children being slaughtered, people being killed in disgusting ways. I mean, children. Who kills children? So much of it is indiscriminate. I saw this video, they said it was in some Arab country but turns out it was filmed in Mexico and had something to do with drug cartels. But anyway, in this video, two men were lying down and this man brings a chain saw and just chops the head off one of the men. Just like that. His head falls off and it was over. The other man sitting next to him, waiting his turn. What was he thinking, knowing he would be next? What does it feel like, to know that in moments you’ll have your head sawed off? I feel bombarded with all of this and I don’t know what to do with it or how to make sense of it all anymore. I’m left with this … this sinking nausea that is closing in on me.”

  “Crazy,” I said, taking another puff of the joint and passing it to him.

  “The Internet, man,” Sufyan said, inhaling. “Suddenly everything is so accessible. Everything is just … here, you know?”

  My attention drifted back to Sufyan’s foot and, without thinking, I reached out and grabbed it. I held his foot in my hands for a moment, unsure what to do with this newfound treasure. I stared at the gray sock, which looked clean and fuzzy and perfect, and thought of how I wanted to be the one who washes these socks, hangs them up to dry, and then folds them delicately back in the drawer. I would do it every day to make sure Sufyan was living well. I gently ran my finger around the contours of his toes, tracing each toenail as I went along. I began massaging his foot, softly at first and then harder. I pressed my fingers deep into the soft skin beneath his sock. Sufyan sighed heavily and relaxed back into the bed, his arm dropped by his side.

  I let go of his foot and picked up his hand, examining the light olive skin. His skin was soft but the veins on the back of his hand were thick and I traced them with my fingers. I could almost feel the blood pulsing through them. I wanted to consume every part of him, his flesh and blood and soul. I gently kissed his vein.

  He sat up and looked at me. He had a strange smile on his face. “So we’re really alone now,” he said. Saying this out loud gave our privacy new meaning. He leaned in and stared at my face. I looked at his smile and realized that what I had been dreaming about for months was about to happen. I was terrified, desperate to stop before we went too far. But his lips were so close, the silver stud just within reach and coming closer by the second. The final second came and went before I could do anything to stop it.

  He kissed me softly at first, like a lamb grazing in a field. Then, when he realized how much I wanted him, hungrily, savagely. He fell on top of me on the floor and I felt the weight of his body, its heaviness, pressing down on me. It was unlike any other feeling I had ever felt or could have imagined. His weight pushed me into the ground as he clawed at my arms and hungrily kissed and licked my face and neck. I ran my hands through his thick dark hair and wished that they might become entangled there, so that we would be connected forever, him and I.

  Except that wasn’t what happened. Perhaps it happened, in an alternate universe where Sufyan and I worked out better. It is how I choose to remember it sometimes, because at least with memory I can control it, I can mold it into my truth like Teta and the president do. But in the cold reality of the universe I was living in, I gently kissed his vein and then …

  “I’m really drunk. I should probably get home.” His voice punctured my hazy thoughts. I dropped his hand. He stood up and rubbed his face, and then looked down at me with half-open eyes.

  “You can spend the night here if you want,” I said. I reached out to grab his hand again but he pulled it away. He ran that beautiful hand through his hair and burped softly.

  “Thanks, but I should probably go home.”

  He walked out the door and down the stairs. His footsteps grew fainter until they were drowned out by a police siren down the street. And then there was emptiness. I locked the door behind him and stared at the empty room. The silence closed in on me. It was well past midnight, but it was already morning back home, so I called Teta.

  The next evening I listened to the American president’s solemn declaration of war. I watched the footage of bombs dropping on a city that looked like my own, and realized that from now until the day I died that city would not be what it had been. It had become shorthand to describe an event. The country that once existed was no more. It had changed the moment the first bomb fell through the dark sky. Before the war had even claimed its first human life, the first victim was the city itself. A concept, a history, a culture.

  Your life must have been so interesting. I grew up in Ohio. We don’t have war and politics and all that stuff.

  I had been so naïve. So naïve for so long. I wanted to stop this terrible movie. I wanted to stand up and block everyone’s view and yell, “Enough! Enough with this! It’s all wrong and this has gone too far. Everything is wrong and you’ve misunderstood it all!”

  But I was trapped inside the movie. The only way to stop this mess would be to stand in the streets and hold up a sign that said: THIS ISN’T REAL. YOU’VE MISUNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING. But if I had learned anything from America, it was that while we may be allowed to hold up a sign, it was very easy to simply shift the eye of the camera until you and your sign were no longer in the shot.

  After that night I didn’t see Sufyan for ten days. For the first few days I feigned illness and missed our shared classes. I avoided DuPont and his usual routes. When I felt ready to face the possibility of running into him, I agreed to go for lunch with Leila. We met at a restaurant called Damascus Express, where we ordered a fantastic mezzeh, some sweet peppermint tea, and shared a slice of knafeh.

  “The last time I went home I was surprised by how many women were wearing the hijab,” Leila said as we ate. “Had there not been as many in the past or had I just not noticed them before?”

  “Come to think of it, a lot of women in our neighborhood downtown wear a hijab,” I said, dipping a piece of bread in the hummus. I had probably eaten more than my share of the fattoush, but Leila didn’t seem to care. “I never thought of it too much before I came here.”

  “Precisely, the hijab meant nothing until America decided it did.” Leila shook her head. “This country is fucking with my head.”

  “Are you going back home anytime soon?” I asked.

  “Inshallah. I need to get to the camps to do a bit more field research.” Leila visited the camps whenever she returned home. She was studying the oral histories of the displaced women there. She spoke often of these women, and in particular of a group of housewives she had spent many long afternoons with, drinking piping-hot tea from thimble-sized glasses. The women gushed over Leila, hugging her and feeding her and asking when she was going to find a husband and advising her on how to dress. Leila laughed it off when she told me this, but I could tell they haunted her. They were her moral compass, her superego, and no matter how many books she read or essays she wrote, they were always there in her mind, asking her when she was going to finally settle down and find a husband and dress more womanlike.

  We ate like kings that afternoon in Damascus Express. We shared our food haphazardly and didn’t split t
he bill. The owner, a fat man who smoked cigarettes by the cash register, made small talk with me as I paid.

  “Where are you from?” he asked. I told him and he smiled. “Ahlan wa sahlan, discount for our family. I knew you were from the bilad. The pain in your eyes is different from the pain of those of us living on this side of the world. Let me tell you brother, here or there, us Arabs will always carry some kind of pain.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I thanked him and walked away.

  Without the possibility of running into Sufyan I felt I had no purpose to my days. I reexamined our time together, trying to figure out what went wrong. Everything had appeared to be moving in the right direction. Perhaps he wasn’t ready to confront his feelings. Or could it be that I had hidden myself too well? I was safe from society. But at what cost?

  Of course then I saw him. I was sitting at my usual table in Damascus Express, drinking Turkish coffee and reading Gramsci’s Selections from the Prison Notebooks. I looked up and saw him placing his order at the counter. His back was to me but I knew it was him. I had memorized the shape of his head and the way his broad shoulders angled sharply at the edges. His water bottle hung from his bag, the afternoon sunlight reflecting off the maroon plastic and the water that sloshed inside. It was him.

  I buried my face in the book. My heart thumped in my chest. My eyes tried to focus on the words on the page but my mind was racing too fast to understand anything.

  Kant’s maxim “act in such a way that your conduct can become a norm for all men in similar conditions” is less simple and obvious than it appears at first sight. What is meant by “similar conditions”? Therefore the agent is the bearer of the “similar conditions” and indeed their creator. That is, he “must” act according to a “model” which he would like to see diffused among all mankind, according to a type of civilization for whose coming he is working — or for whose preservation he is “resisting” the forces that threaten its disintegration.