The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

  Francine was two years ahead of me in medical school, and I’d seen her around. She’d be hard to miss. You told her once that she was the most beautiful woman you’d ever seen, so you can imagine the effect she had on me when we were both still young. That face, those shrewd eyes, full lips I wanted to love bite, the sensuousness, skin the color of dark umber. I remember seeing her once in sea-green linen, in the library trying to read papers while prone on a scabrous sofa, drained, pages falling to the floor as she dozed. She’d pick them back up one by one, arrange them in order, and they would slip once again when her eyes closed. I fell hard before we exchanged one word.

  Even then, she had those eyes that could see both angels and demons. I thought, here was a woman who found everything surprising and nothing shocking. Of course I fell. She was what I wanted to be and what I wanted. I was at the height of my awkwardness at the time. Jennifer, the woman I’d mistakenly thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with, had left me nine months earlier. I was going through a phase of thinking no woman would ever want me again. I was beginning to wear a new body, trying it out, shedding what I had been, leaving it behind like old snakeskin along a riverbank while I tried not to drown, tried to come out of the water as who I was and what I truly cared about, allowing myself to be seen for the first time. And there was Francine, seeming to know who she was, what she wanted, ever natural and assured. How could I not be enthralled?

  One of the school’s administrators held a party of some sort, probably some occasion, but it felt as if the event’s primary purpose was to show off her Cambridge Craftsman house to new students. Around a table laden with a cheap, barely edible buffet, soft drinks in liter bottles, inexpensive wine in even bigger ones, fanned paper napkins in various colors, we milled about, doctors, professors, students, pretending to be interested in whatever someone was saying, feeling sorry for ourselves, or at least I was. I couldn’t muster enough pleasantness for the inane chatter. I reminded myself that this was the kind of awkward evening that turned into a night of insomnia if I was not careful. I was about to leave when I noticed Francine in the middle of the living room, by herself, a paper plate in one hand. She held up a piece of cheese in the other, floppy and yellow, examined it with amazement, as if bewitched by its incongruous structure and consistency. What substance is this? What unnatural color, what creepy flavor? First contact with sliced, individually wrapped Muenster.

  I walked toward her, uncertain and clumsy, unsure of the rules, as if I were moving around within the holy sanctuary of a religion not my own, but I had to halt before reaching the altar. The elevator music in the background had morphed into a Bob Marley song, and Francine pirouetted. Alone in the middle of the room, she and her dreadlocks swayed to the rhythm. Her yellow dress was loose enough that it seemed to move a moment after she did except at the hips, where the belt kept a perfect beat. The skin of her delicious arms soaked up the bad lighting and reflected a divine glow, a corporeal luster. She didn’t give up her plate, twirled with it as if with an intimate, a dervish waitress. The hostess followed her example. She too began to dance. She dragged a man out to be her partner. A few others joined. Bless your soul, Bob Marley, savior of bad parties everywhere. We had ourselves a dance floor. Next to Francine, everyone was a pale corpse, the dancing dead. At least three men tried to dance with her, one tried to mimic her movements, looking foolish, another tried to bump hips, the third danced with both thumbs hooked in his back pockets, and she gracefully slid away, spun into her own world. She danced as if she was exploring her body in space.

  You can see that this is her people’s music, one of the doctors said to another. She was born to reggae. She’s Haitian, I said, laughing nervously. Not the same thing, not the same thing at all. I could not remain next to these doctors; I left my spot, their conversation fading like the sound of the freeway at a distance. I found myself circling the makeshift dance floor, hypnotized almost, unthinking, sleepwalking in a way, my eyes not leaving her. A small citrine stone bounced on its chain between her breasts, calling to me. Come, it said. Lick me. A bead of sweat formed on her forehead like a pearl. And I found myself dancing. Not with her, not at first. I too began to explore my body in space, my new body, its shape and how it moved, the curves of my lines. These are what we call breasts; these are my arms. I introduced myself to its new odors. No woman, no cry, but this woman was dancing.

  Francine decided to join me. We moved together, two solitudes in sync, following a beat.

  I knew that I would belong to her, that I would do anything for her, when she began to look at her plate in the middle of the dance floor. She picked an apple slice, a red one, brought it close to my face. I opened my mouth, her pinky and ring finger caressed my cheek, her thumb and forefinger placed the fruit on my tongue, and it exploded in my mouth, not with taste, mind you, but with possibility.

  The Sea, the Sea

  I woke up disoriented, my neck awkwardly propped on the unfluffed pillow. I was like a drunkard coming to, unable to put together what I’d done the night before or where I was. The hotel room felt unfamiliar, dark and in shadows. The air flowed around me like cold ink, seemed to settle on my body. Nothing felt intimate. Jet lag felt horrible. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, amorphous shapes coalescing into sense. I leaned toward the nightstand on my left and clicked on the lamp. I stood up, motor functions operating properly. A quick shower might cleanse my mind and wash away the muddle. When I passed my reflection in the mirror a soulful groan rippled through my body. I both was and was not that woman measuring me. The gray hairs befuddled me. I still couldn’t get used to their increasing numbers. I thought I’d gained at least ten pounds since Christmas nine days ago. My hips were moons whose gravitational pull forced my breasts to droop. Shower, shower, please. I felt slightly better as soon as I heard the sound of waves hitting the shore not too far from my hotel room.

  I can’t tell you how much I miss the smell of the sea. You’re from the mountains; it can’t be the same for you. My father’s family lived in Ain el-Mraisseh for generations. I was raised by the sea. Call me Aphrodite, why don’t you. I used to love walking the corniche—in daytime, when the boys would dive from high rocks while the bourgeoisie suntanned on lounge chairs, and at nightfall, when the fishermen rowed out into the darkened sea with their awkward boats. I even loved the Mediterranean in stormy weather, the euphonic sound of waves battering those rocks felt invigorating. Salt air quickened my soul.

  The first time Mazen and I met after my cataclysmic family expulsion was in Vence, a little town on the Riviera. One of the myriad of remarkable things he brought with him—a jar of fig jam, Fairuz’s latest compact disc, the first shirt we shared when we settled on the same size as teenagers and I would no longer receive his hand-me-downs—was a gray photograph of us on a beach south of Beirut. It seemed my mother had thrown out all my belongings and everything else that would remind her of me, but she didn’t know that Mazen had a few photos in his possession. We were young, maybe five and six—a serrated photo, glued inside a cardboard folder that had four silver triangle pockets for the corners to fit into, protected by a sheet of embossed, semitransparent paper. Mazen covers me in sand, with only my head showing, whereas he is covered in a dusting of grains, having emerged from his own burial not too long before. My eyes are shut. I look in ecstasy, my gender indeterminate. We were born of the sea, he and I.

  When Mazen married his wife, they moved into an apartment not far from our parents’ home. He could not live far from the sea or from our awful mother. When his wife divorced him, he allowed her to keep custody of their children, but he kept their small apartment. She left him for a rich man who promised to take care of her. She moved into a glorious penthouse apartment where she could actually see the sea, not just smell it.

  Except she ended up not exactly wanting custody of her children. She wasn’t a cruel mother, not in the traditional sense. My niece and nephew lived with her—well, ostensibly t
hey did. She put them in the best schools, bought them the best clothes, and hired the best nannies from the Philippines to take care of them. She didn’t ask Mazen for a single lira in alimony. The children preferred to stay in Mazen’s small apartment, which was what they knew. She rarely noticed that they were not at home, and the nannies loved the time off. The driver she’d hired to deliver them to school began to pick them up at the two-bedroom where they slept atop each other. But they, too, loved the sea’s recurring slurring sound. They gave up rarefied air for the salty kind.

  You said California suited you better than the East Coast because you couldn’t bear the idea of the sun being reborn out of the sea every morning. Apollo’s chariot needed to plummet at the end of the day. The sun must drop into the water, drowning and dying for our eyes.

  The Art of the Walk

  It was still an ungodly hour. I stood at the edge of the harbor, taking deep breaths, the water giving off a saline, fishy smell, as well as that of motorboat fuel mingled with the acrid tannin aroma of surrounding trees. The sun had not yet appeared and neither had the horizon. In preparation for the rose bloom of dawn, early shadows began to form around the moored fishing boats. The slow lapping of water matched my breath.

  I was supposed to have breakfast with Emma, but it was too early. I would walk. East or west, a mental coin flip, and I trudged west along a road not well asphalted, the beach to my right. A cold, intense blue drifted in the air.

  I scuffed through mud, among the sodden seethe of leaves, following a bend that looped me around the northern part of the island. The landscape was not as pristine as I’d hoped. Various dwellings interrupted the unpeopled scenery, all occupied by NGOs, it seemed: a house and garden for Doctors Without Borders, a building blazing with mildew and a tent campsite for the Spanish lifeguards, a motor home that distributed food. A confusing cardboard sign nailed to a pine tree said doctor 16:00–11:00 p.m., with an arrow pointing in the same direction I was walking. A sign pointing in the other direction was for a medical bus called Adventist Help, but the cardboard had aged so much the writing was barely legible, which made me wonder whether the Seventh-day Adventists had packed their bus and driven off. Another sign farther along offered free clothing; underneath it lay a dozen large garbage bags. Were refugees supposed to take morning walks and then rifle through the black garbage bags for outfits that fit? Strange was this world of volunteering. Along a fence full of constellations of woodworm holes, an aspiring artist had hung a series of the orange life vests abandoned by refugees after the crossing, three above each other, then two, then three, then two, like the workout graphs on treadmills. A little farther, red life vests were hung in the shape of a heart.

  I should take morning walks when I get home, though that might upset Francine. She takes a power walk every day along the lake, winter, spring, summer, except if we’re having one of those berserk snowstorms. This is her solitary time away from me, no distractions. She leaves her phone behind. It would be selfish of me to take that away from her. Even if I walked in a different direction, it would still be an imposition. I mentioned walking to her once years ago. Fine, she said, but why didn’t I walk on an elliptical at the gym, better for my creaky knees and all that. I did so for a while, but I didn’t like the fact that I’d exert so much effort and remain in place.

  Mazen is a walker as well. When he last visited me two years ago, he dragged me all over the city, from Hyde Park to Rogers Park, from the Loop to Oak Park, for hours and hours. I ended up with blisters. He loved the flatness of the city compared to Beirut, loved the unbroken sidewalks, the lack of car horns. I must have lost five pounds during his time with me, but not Mazen. He was always a mite rotund, even as a child, no weight loss no matter how much he ate or dieted.

  I noticed footprints in the mud, different from those I was making. Someone had walked this road barefoot. I could see the heel impressions and the oval depressions of the toes. Was it a volunteer or a refugee? Since no boats had landed on this side of the island for a few days, the prints probably belonged to a drunk volunteer returning late. I turned around and began my walk back to the square.

  The village was waking up, the square’s pulse weak but getting stronger. The night raised its dark backside gingerly. A young woman inside the aquarium café from the night before took chairs off tables. A fisherman cleaned the outboard motor of his boat. Mourning doves cooed passionately under the eaves of a restaurant. And an unexpected sight in this rustic vista, a cross-dressing villager sitting leg over leg on a wooden chair underneath the plane tree, with a cigarette that glowed into sudden life. An antique bronze kettle of coffee, its top covered with a saucer, waited on the stone wall next to the chair. A calico lay across the cross-dresser’s lap, purring loudly, offering her elongated neck for petting. We are everywhere, I thought. I wondered briefly how long I would have to withhold gendering, what clue would be offered. The red dress was much too short for cold weather, particularly without nylons or socks, hairy legs bared; a worn charcoal duffel coat was shorter than the dress. No wig, short, misbehaving white hair, no makeup. He likely identified as a man, a middle-aged guy in a red dress and sensible black pumps. He would later confirm my assumption. He had a smile on his face as he bent forward and whispered to the cat, definitely a morning person. An old Greek widow—stereotypical mourning black including head scarf, cane, and wicker basket—approached him, chatted for a minute. She petted the cat and continued toward the harbor.

  When he noticed me, he said something that sounded like kaliméra, hesitated, and followed with a good morning. I raised an eyebrow and pointed to the chair next to him, asking if I could sit. I then had to decline his offer of a cigarette. His English was nonexistent. Did I speak German? No, I didn’t. Did he speak French, mais bien sûr, Madame. His name was Nikolaos, of course. I’d known three Greeks in my life and all were named Nick or Nikolaos and so was every other Greek Orthodox boy in Lebanon. He’d spent a couple of years in Paris in his youth, such a lovely city, but not livable. A local man with a large duffel bag and a riotous beard came over, nodded toward me in acknowledgment, then launched into some funny Greek story. Nikolaos, now vibrant and animated, responded with something funnier, because riotous beard guy literally doubled over. He hauled his bag toward the harbor, still chuckling, his oversize stomach rising and falling like a busy pump. I asked Nikolaos what that was about and he unsuccessfully tried to explain. He asked where I was from, what I was doing in Skala Sikamineas. I told him I was a naturalized American, originally Lebanese, my mother was Syrian, and I was here because I wanted to help. He suggested I wasn’t like the others. There must have been other trans volunteers, I told him. I knew of at least one.

  “You’re trans?” he said. “I thought you were, you know, just a dyke.”

  “I’m that as well,” I said.

  He said I was different because I talked to him—well, more than talked since a number of the European volunteers did so, but I was willing to have a conversation, not talk at him or tell him what to do. I told him to give me a little time; my wife complained all the time that I told everyone what to do. He found that mildly amusing. He explained that these volunteers, be they European or American, behaved exactly like the German tourists who arrived every summer full of imperious airs and left with shellacked skin and complaints about the chaos that was the island.

  “Can you imagine?” he said. “Some Germans would give us advice on cooking. Think about that for a moment.”

  His eyes slanted toward the temples and bulged as if he had Graves’ disease, in the early stages of exophthalmos, which gave him a strange look, almost like he had compound eyes with an abnormally wide angle of vision. What struck me more were his black pumps. How he could walk in them on these half-ass streets was beyond me. I tried wearing pumps a couple of times some thirty years ago, and it was a no-go, no way, not on your or anyone else’s life.

  Lesbos was a sleepy island. Nikolaos joked that
their supply of things to happen had run out when Sappho was laid to rest. Things that happened happened elsewhere. But when the Syrian refugees first arrived, the entire village, the whole island, mobilized to help. No islander would ever leave another human being at the mercy of capricious waves, no matter who they were. That was the law of the sea. Why, that same man with the riotous beard once saved twenty-three refugees whose boat had capsized. He happened to be fishing in the area when he heard screams—men, women, children, and babies. Twenty-three people on that boat of his was neither safe nor smart but necessary. None of the refugees knew how to swim; none of them had even seen the sea before they made their crossing. As soon as a villager saw a boat, there would be a call and all would come out to help, even Nikolaos, though not in his black pumps. The country was in the worst recession in recent memory, no thanks to the Germans, yet villagers opened their homes, shared their meals, donated their clothes. Sometimes there were thirty or forty people sleeping in one house. The NGOs and the volunteers came. They thought they were doing God’s work and they expected the villagers to serve them.

  “They came because the situation was overwhelming,” I said. “The numbers multiplied exponentially. You know that. It’s a human disaster.”

  “Of course,” he said. “But all these Northern Europeans think they fart higher than their ass.”

  I hadn’t heard the idiom before, and when sylphlike Emma, also in pumps, made her grand appearance, Nikolaos and I were in the midst of giggling like preteen schoolgirls. I had to introduce them to each other; they hadn’t met, which was not a revelation since I knew Emma was not fond of drag queens, let alone cross-dressers. She felt their existence belittled who she was. She turned down our invitation to sit. She wanted breakfast and, more important, a cup of coffee. I startled her by asking Nikolaos if he wished to join us, but he declined, pointing to his coffee cup and the calico sleeping on his lap.