Mister N, page 3
It took days for him to relearn how to eke out a few letters. These were followed by syllables and sounds that he put together any which way to see whether some meaning might arise from various combinations. Then he began writing complete sentences, which he would sometimes copy out dozens of times, until they resounded in his head like a drumbeat. He began following a schedule, like a robot programmed to the task—until his language dyspepsia struck again, in any case. He would sit at his table every morning, arrange his pencils and erasers, and write—like a disabled man training an injured limb to resume its function—until he could do so without any anxiety or discomfort.
Miss Zahra didn’t ask him what he was writing about. She did her best to show no curiosity, in case that might disturb him. It was enough for them both that she concluded each of her visits with a quick glance at his papers and a proud smile, considering herself to be the source of his inspiration. And perhaps it didn’t matter to her what he wrote. The important thing was that he was doing it, and that she saw him doing it. No doubt the idea that he was a writer pleased her, thought Mr. N—or maybe it was more that she liked the idea of herself pleasing a writer? Women love writers, yes? Well, not counting Thurayya and Neda. So, Miss Zahra wanted him to be a writer? Okay, he would go back to being a writer. For her sake. And if it was all for her sake, then why should he be angry if she was the one who stole his papers—or borrowed them, rather, in order to read them? Didn’t that only confirm she was interested and wanted to know at last what her favorite writer was working on?
Mr. N felt joy at the notion. It settled over his skin like a cold nightgown, then like a bath of warm water, and finally like a comfortable blanket. He felt the sap coursing through him again to nourish his arteries and veins. He looked at his watch. It was 10:25. Fantastic! He still had plenty of time. He took out a sheet of paper, a new pencil, and an eraser from the table’s drawer. From now on, he would try to keep his handwriting as legible as possible, and he would erase rather than cross out. Without mentioning a word about it, he would write what he wanted Miss Zahra to know, pleading to God that she would want to read more.
———
For days after I emerged from the grave, I kept feeling phlegm gather relentlessly in my lungs and work its way up my throat, yet without a single cough. Was it brought on by my long period of silence? Or all the dirt that got through the wrappings of my grave clothes and lodged in my mouth and lungs? For a time, I was afraid to open my lips. Then it became clear to me that what was gathering inside me and clogging my chest so cruelly wasn’t phlegm but rather congealed words. They rose until they started hurting my throat and interfering with my breathing. The words had gotten stuck, and evolved into little slugs, their spinal columns metamorphosing into sticky, clinging pseudopods that left viscous trails behind. One day, the nausea rose within me like a tidal wave, and bile came gushing out of my mouth. I vomited up everything in my guts, followed by everything in my soul, and then everything in my memory. I disgorged ink, paper, murderers, the corrupt, liars, hangmen, and … To be brief, I vomited up my spirit, and I sat there looking at it, writhing in its juices on the pavement, gasping like a fish out of water. It implored me to take it back inside. All the while, I kept looking at it like someone rejoicing over an enemy’s pain.
Back when I was still a writer, I liked the way words filled my imagination. They made no claims, played no tricks. They didn’t lie the way they do now. All they did was come out, one after the other, each leading the next, as though holding hands, trooping out of the dark, a train of words. Unless it was one of those days when they jumped and danced, unbound by gravity. But today, or yesterday, or tomorrow, now that I’ve given up writing because I can no longer bear it—despite my incredible power to endure everything—they are no longer so innocent; I feel their putrid souls rushing in, choking me with their yellow rot. I resist. I wake every dawn and flush from my holes whatever might have pushed its way in overnight to operate inside me without my permission. I dump it all into the toilet and flush it away. Nevertheless, the intruders keep coming, more and more every night. I’m no good at judging between them, at taking the measure of things. Just like everybody else, I suspect—unless, my God, I’m the only one?
Miss Zahra reassures me, saying that this putrescence in me is my truth, and that its source is not some flaw in me, but in the outside world. Meanwhile, she talks about the garbage crisis—about huge piles of trash that have nowhere to go and will eventually bury the country and all of us with it. She talks and talks and I don’t pay any attention because I’m too busy trying to keep the proper distance from life, trying to keep the equanimity that everyone is always recommending. I don’t know where I’m supposed to have acquired this sangfroid, let alone how I’m supposed to keep hold of it like everyone else claims to do. Yes, they carry it wherever they go and set it up as a barrier between themselves and the things of this world. I think it must be made of some very tough stuff, this distance, otherwise how could it offer any refuge, how could it be used for protection? And it must be pretty big, too, otherwise how would anyone hide under it? Or is it that nobody has really achieved that distance, that it’s entirely hypothetical, something people talk about in the hope that it will finally be granted to them, an invisible, impervious glass wall around their persons, or maybe some kind of freestanding force field off which heartbreak and sorrow would simply bounce, harmlessly, and disappear …
In any case, I have no such protection. It’s like I’m completely naked. No, it’s like I’m naked and missing my skin too, with my nerves exposed to the light. Yes, that’s me: an invisible, hypothetical creature that the wind blows right through. Protect yourself! they scream to me. Break free, man. Get away! And don’t look back …
Mr. N placed his palm upon the page, fingers stretching toward the corners. He closed his hand and slowly squeezed, concentrating on the quiet protests made by the crumpling paper. When the sheet, filled with lines of gray insects, now squashed, was balled up in the palm of his hand, he went to the bathroom and threw it in the wastebasket. He worried that if Miss Zahra happened to read what had just come out of him, it might make her afraid. Mr. N hadn’t realized how free he’d been before the woman developed an interest in what he was writing. Now he was weighed down, fettered by the image she had of him in her mind. He turned on the water in the sink and washed the pencil marks from his hands. He splashed cold water over his face as he resisted the appalling nausea still gathering in the pit of his stomach, fighting to keep it from blasting like a rocket out through his esophagus, his throat, his teeth. No, no, it’s alright now. He took the crumpled page out of the wastebasket and tore it into tiny pieces that he threw into the toilet bowl. It wasn’t long before felt his stomach muscles relax again. He could picture Miss Zahra coming back to him, smiling and reassuring. Mr. N looked into the mirror, meeting his own eyes without hesitation, without anxiety. He felt a new vigor, a desire to try again. He counted—one, two, three—and then raced back to where the stack of white pages was waiting.
What’s better, a book or a tree? A tree, of course. Books mostly die, and those that live on are very few, even if they do tend to accumulate over the course of a few centuries. God, why am I not a tree? Why am I not a tree? Why am I not a tree? I’m waiting for an answer, God. Sentences float in my head like filth in a clogged sink; they spill through my fingers and my hands … That’s actually a sentence I’ve written before, and though I have died, it is still alive, lodged underneath my tongue.
The calendar says it’s Wednesday. Yes, the calendar speaks, even if it’s asked to be quiet. I don’t like Wednesdays; Lazarus rose on a Saturday. Lazarus, who was from Bayt Aniya, which means “the house of misery and tribulation” in Aramaic. The whole world is Bayt Aniya. I feel sweat running down my scalp, even though it isn’t hot and the sun isn’t burning. At least I’ve kept my spirits up for a little while by washing my face and hands. I wiped them on the white towel that has some small rust spots in the right corner; spots that move, when I turn the towel over, to the left side. I look at both sides every time I use this towel, then I hang it back up next to the bathroom sink. It’s my favorite of the towels here because I can tell it apart from the others, which are identical to it in every other respect. It comes and goes, though, this towel; it vanishes out of circulation once in a while, hiding who knows where, only to reappear suddenly, as though nothing had happened, as though it hadn’t been eluding me for weeks. The most disgusting things in the world are similarity and repetition, I think. Towels are like faces, which you also can’t tell apart: circles with five holes—or seven, if we count the ears. The Arabic word for towel comes from the verb “to dry.” There’s nothing better than bringing language back to its roots. Language everywhere is starting to drift away from where it began.
I get up from my bed every day like someone picking himself off the field of battle, rising from the slaughter and destruction. The first thing I do is draw my net out of the water of sleep and gather the images, the bodies, and the ideas that are caught within it, that sloughed off of me in slumber and which I’ve left behind. Having caught them, I throw them down on paper, and then I throw the paper into the bathroom wastebasket before returning once more to set up my net and wait until night—as it does with such terrible consistency—falls at last. This night that comes to visit me every night … and the night is salt.
The night is salt … Whose line is that, I wonder? I’m pretty sure it’s not mine—I’m not a writer anymore—but where did it come from? There’s a cloud in my head. And wind. And cotton. How I loved words in the old days! All the clean, clear, light, graceful words. I loved being able to line up the three consonants like backgammon pieces: milh, hulm, lahm, hamal, lamah, lahh, hall, mall, hamm, muhh. I loved whatever was short and sweet, or short and not sweet, or sweet and not short. How I wish I could bring speech back to its origins! If only I could raise it from its grave, like Lazarus, and bring it back to the light. O Lord, asked Lazarus, is all that talking on my account? Why did you bring me back to the night to face what I have done?
Whenever I’m not paying attention, my room fills up with the words I’ve spent my day shooing away from my face like flies. If I doze off for a few moments, they begin seeping from my ears, my eyes, and my nostrils, like I’ve hemorrhaged inside, quietly and without warning … Out they come, little devils dragging along all their little sins, their pointy teeth, their tongues that are themselves the heads of snakes … They scream, scratch, and hiss before being driven off by the good light shining through my window. At first, like everyone else, I didn’t know what I was doing. I went out of my way to place my own head among the snakeheads of language, never once realizing that words were my enemy, wanting only to sneak into my mouth and leave poison under my tongue. And there’s no remedy, no antidote, no vaccine. Words are everywhere, they’re the atoms in the air, vibrations rising from the ground; they fall from the sky. An epidemic. You write a word: it rises from nothingness, puts on clothes, acquires a body and a face. Then people come up and greet it and act like it’s the one in charge! Oh, and sometimes that well-dressed word forms a gang, and that gang starts roving around and knocking people to the ground, sometimes beating them to death …
That’s what happened to me. I wrote a name. Then the name rose off the paper and became a man …
———
Mr. N was standing on his beloved apartment balcony, using a feather duster to clean the dirt piling up in the corners. Going over to the gardenia and the carnation in their pots near his writing table, he raised his head to look up at the looming tower overhead, with all its many levels, rising higher each day and casting a shadow not only over his building but upon Mr. N himself, making him feel like a dwarf contending with a giant. He and his spacious balcony had dwindled to the size of a fly beneath the tower’s gaze. Even during the war, Mr. N hadn’t felt that anything really threatened his neighborhood. Not because it was spared the bombings that all neighborhoods were exposed to then, share and share alike, but because N—though he wasn’t called N back then—was certain that his building was too solidly built, too low to the ground, too hidden on its side street, to make for a worthy target. And so it was—with the exception of the building’s glass, which got broken and needed replacing all the time.
“It won’t be long before this damn tower drives me from my balcony and my home!” Mr. N said aloud, feeling his chest tighten. He went inside. Maybe emigration was the solution. He could shut his front door, head for the airport, and buy a ticket on the first available flight. Just like in the movies. Without any suitcases, visas, or complications. He would trot around the globe to his heart’s content, and if he got tired, he could just rest wherever he happened to find himself. That’s how his earliest ancestors did it after they rose up onto their hind legs and learned how to look off into the distance. They would just get going. They would have a bite and then get going. Have sex, stand up, and get going. They would give birth to their children and nurse them as they walked. They traversed all of Africa on foot. Then they moved on to the rest of the continents, occupying the globe, barefoot and naked. I too want to travel like that, thought Mr. N. I will walk in a straight line, and when I run into the sea, I will wind my way along the coast, step by step, until I’ve circled the Mediterranean and … and returned to where I started.
One day, Mr. N decided to go out. But where to? It was a long time since N had departed his little circle of light. The number of his friends was already zero. Relationships with other human beings were nonexistent. His basic, daily social interactions amounted to nothing. “Why not go down to Bourj Hammoud?” he heard himself saying. He could take along whatever he needed and make a day of it. He could stay away until the construction noise went quiet for the day. The idea was persuasive. More, the idea was intriguing. It would allow Mr. N to take stock of an area of the city he’d rarely visited. His life tended to take him toward the city’s center rather than its outskirts. He went into his bathroom to confront its nonfunctional, European-style toilet. Taking the bit that needed replacing from where he’d left it on top of the tank, he dropped it into a white cotton tote bag, slung the bag over his shoulder, and exited his sanctuary, hurrying down the steep staircase.
Outside, he looked up at what remained of the blue sky above his neighborhood. Then, eyes on the ground, he walked on, trying to avoid any glimpse of that monstrosity up there ruining his life. He left his familiar precincts and ambled through the streets leading down to Mar Mikhael. When he reached Armenia Street, he turned right and followed its gradual descent. He was used to walking in the opposite direction, toward Gemmayzeh Street, Martyr’s Square, and downtown. From there, he would continue on to where there was still a sea, a boardwalk, and seaside cafés.
Mr. N reached the corniche along the Beirut River, where he was forced to a stop at an intersection, waiting for the light. He could see the small bridge spanning the river. Sometimes the riverbed filled with streams of rainwater that had lost their way, but more often it was empty, a slick of mud waiting to be dried in the sun into a solid mass with all the filth that tended to accumulate there. The light turned green, but the line of cars did not move. Drivers began leaning on their horns to rebuke the dawdling cars at the head of the line. As they came to life and shot off down the road, Mr. N smiled at their idiocy and pressed his palms over his ears to protect them from the blaring horns. After he made his escape to the narrow, rising sidewalk on the far side, he slowed to a walk as the muscles of his legs reined him in, struggling with this modest ascent after so long with almost no exertion. He stopped, wiped away the sweat, and put his hands on his hips until he caught his breath. The district houses, most of them grouped on the left-hand side of the river as you looked downstream, came into view with a thousand colors and shapes. The first was a square apartment building, some of its seven floors decorated with green curtains, looking as though it had somehow escaped a thousand and one wars. At the next turn, Mr. N saw the outskirts of the Karantina district and the overpass to the highway to Daoura.
A picture sprang to mind of his father putting on his sunglasses as he drove his white Chevrolet with its red leather interior alongside the river. Mr. N sat in the back, not yet ten years old, while his brother, older by seven years and seven months, got to sit in front. They were listening to their father talk about the river, which in decades past had actually been a river, one to which the families of the surrounding neighborhoods would make their way to bathe or else to clean and dry their sheep’s wool before using it to stuff mattresses and blankets. Mr. N’s father also spoke about the train that crossed the river nearby on its way to Mount Lebanon or the north.
These days, Mr. N could barely remember the city of corrugated metal structures they used to pass on their way to Achrafieh. Lying low and dense in the distance, its tin roofs blazed under unobstructed sun. Once, when Mr. N asked his father what it was and who lived there, his father replied, “That’s Karantina, the quarantine, a name it received for being a lazaretto set up by Muhammad Ali when he came from Egypt to conquer this region in the 1800s. It burned in 1933, and the Armenian residents who survived moved to Bourj Hammoud, only for their place to be taken by the Palestinians. Today, twenty-seven thousand souls live in Karantina, a majority of them sick. They’re the ones who come in to the clinic every Saturday.”
Indeed, Mr. N preferred not to remember. He put his father out of his mind, along with the white Chevrolet. He banished the thought of his older brother and of Karantina, which had burned with all its poor more than once. Everything from Mr. N’s past seemed to bite him like a snake. Everything he kept inside was poison in his heart.
