The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

  Your father rented a monster of a car, a Cadillac. That was what one drove on the big roads of America. You stayed in a hotel close to campus. On your second night in LA, you were to visit friends of the family who lived in Pasadena. They had suggested you meet at a landmark, the Hilton Pasadena, and drive to their home from there. On a slip of paper you wrote down the directions given to you by the concierge. Your father suggested you drive. You could use the experience since you would soon be eighteen and would need a car.

  He made fun of you even as you settled in the driver’s seat. Were you sure you could reach the gas pedal? Ribbing you was his favorite pastime. You thought driving the rental Cadillac was a piece of cake. Your father asked repeatedly if you knew what you were doing. You reached Robertson Boulevard and turned south. You got on the ramp for I-10 and merged into traffic smoothly. You were looking for the Pasadena Freeway, you announced confidently. You turned on the radio, but your dad turned it right off, wanting no distractions.

  You reached the second freeway and got on it. Again, you merged into traffic wonderfully. You could see your father smiling. All of a sudden, on your right, among tall buildings, you saw a large sign that said hilton in red neon. Look, you said gleefully. You were already there. You took the first exit and voilà, you drove right to the Hilton’s entrance.

  Your father was proud of you. You were his boy for sure.

  You used the pay phone to call the family friend and inform him that you’d arrived. He sounded amazed you’d made it that quickly and told you he would be there shortly. You waited in the lobby and waited and waited. No one showed up.

  Your father called his friend after half an hour had passed. You began to sweat when you heard him laughing on the phone. You weren’t at the Pasadena Hilton but instead at the Los Angeles Hilton. You were downtown, even though the freeway had loudly announced itself as the Pasadena Freeway. You were supposed to take it all the way to Pasadena. How were you to know that? You couldn’t conceive of the existence of more than one Hilton in a country, let alone in one city. Why would a country have more than one Hilton?

  Your father snickered and said he would be driving.

  And like all of us, you did experience trauma.

  You wrote about the early troubles you faced as an immigrant, being called all kinds of names during the Iran hostage crisis by classmates at that most liberal of institutions, UCLA. You tried to explain that you were neither an Iranian nor a Muslim, but how could you convince anyone while speaking with a distinct accent?

  You were unable to pronounce Eye-ranian the way they did.

  Someone smashed your car window with a baseball bat in the parking lot of a gay bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, while you were inside the car no less. Would you consider that an immigrant trauma or your run-of-the-mill gay bashing? How unfair. You hadn’t even gone into the bar. You’d been sitting in your car for fifteen minutes to make sure that no one was carding at the door and another fifteen trying to build up the courage to walk in.

  It was a new car, too, your first in America.

  Welcome to Moria, Ladies and Gentlemen

  I saw you standing in the heart of Moria. I looked up the hill, up the cement road, and you were smack in the middle, between the fenced barracks, the prefabricated offices of the NGOs, the tents—so many tents—the garbage dumpsters, the garbage. You were looking downhill, but you didn’t see me or the kids I was with. You couldn’t take your eyes off the Greek riot police in high butch behind me at the bottom of the hill, with their vans and their batons and their Power Ranger outfits complete with face shields. You stuck out like a mole on clear skin—a beauty mark, darling, a beauty mark. In the midst of misery, you looked more miserable, even from a distance, anxiety discernable in your posture. I walked toward you up the hill, people going up and down, volunteers, refugees, all nationalities. A few sub-Saharan Africans kicked a soccer ball around, a game between pup tents, each with a refugee family guarding its entrance, long lines of people to my left and to my right, and puddles, mud puddles everywhere. Many people, so many. Families, single men, children. The boys pointed out Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Iranians, and more, more. North Africans from Algeria, from Morocco, sub-Saharan Africans from Mali, from Congo. Everyone was running away from much, the Syrian regime, Daesh, the Taliban, terrorist groups with even sillier monikers. Lines everywhere, for registration, for food, for clothes, for donations. And white people directing pedestrian traffic.

  The kids kept up their job, chattering with each step. That was where they received free tea, here was where they could get extra blankets. The soccer ball belonged to a Greek man, and you had to write your name down and wait to borrow it. Then you had to return it in half an hour. I paid only half attention. As I approached I began to feel concern for you. More than despondent, you looked frightened and disoriented, as if you’d just woken up into a horror of a dream. I wondered whether you were about to have an anxiety attack or were in the midst of one. Something intrigued you, made you turn around. I stopped a couple of feet away. The boys pointed to a prefab structure where volunteers were serving hot drinks and cookies, said they would get in line for their cookies and if I wanted one I would have to stand with them. I told them I wanted to talk to you. They promised to return.

  From a few feet away I watched you watch a handsome young Syrian teenager talking on an older-model iPhone, overbundled in sweaters and duffel coat, his eyes shiny and resinous. The small, jutting rock he sat on would keep his pressed pants dry if not clean. He gave the impression of wearing all his belongings. He relayed the details of his journey to his mother back in Syria, the interminable wait on the Turkish shore, the dinghy crossing, the rain, the registration lines. He tried to ask about the rest of his family, but he would be cut short, having to tell her how he was doing, nothing was more important than him. You and I waited for a minute or two. We heard and observed, and then he broke. He wept silently before telling his mother how much he missed her or, more precisely, how much her absence devastated him, and I heard you gasp. Our language is heartrending. You were about to cry, too, but you looked around quickly, noticed me hanging around, and controlled yourself, pulled your face together. He put his phone away and stood up, such a beautiful boy, a breathing kouros, fully clothed, taller than either of us, but then few weren’t. I saw you step forward, then stop, then move again. The veins along your temple throbbed and thrummed and expanded. You introduced yourself to the young man, apologized to him, said you couldn’t help overhearing the conversation. Could you ask him a few questions, find out his story? Your voice sounded soft and brittle, as if you were a vinyl record played on an old gramophone. He seemed flustered at first but eased up, possibly when he realized you were more nervous than he. Where was he from? From a village outside Hama. No, there was no war or violence in his part of the province, some skirmishes, many deaths a year and a half ago but not now. There was nothing, literally nothing, no work, no school. He was eighteen and a half—he stressed the half—and he wanted an education, to study something, anything. What could he do? His family gathered all its money, his father, his mother, two of his uncles, even his grandmother; everything went into a pot to get him to Europe. He was hoping for Germany, but he would go anywhere that had a university. He would study, work hard, repay all of his family’s investment and faith and then some. He would not shirk, not he. You allowed him to walk off when he was done talking, his head down, leaning forward, almost breaking into a run down the hill, away.

  The kids returned, asking what I wished to see next. The Iraqi girl was the only one of them still eating her cookie. I told them that I wanted to talk to you for a minute, pointing to where you were, but you were there no longer. You had vanished, poof. Now it was my turn to stand where you’d stood, flummoxed and disoriented in the midst of the refugee camp, wondering what happened to you, not knowing where to look, where east and west were. The riot police were still at the bottom of the hill. Bu
t unlike you a few minutes earlier, I had my children around me, the little Iraqi girl holding my hand, the grainy stickiness of sugar in my palm.

  You, the Nervous Wreck

  You would later say that that incident was your breaking point. You wanted to go back to San Francisco and get a manicure, paint your nails blue, get a massage, get away. You said you ended up in your hotel room in Mytilene behind a locked door, under the sheets, noise-canceling headphones blasting Christa Ludwig singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder into your soul. What breaks us is rarely what we expect.

  I had read the essays you wrote about Syrian refugees in 2012 and 2013. They were one of the reasons I came to this Greek island. You’d been working with refugees in Lebanon since the beginning, years before the crisis in Lesbos. You’d interviewed children whose entire families were killed, talked to survivors of massacres, met victims of torture. You interviewed a seven-year-old girl who showed you a drawing of her lost home hanging from a parachute. She said the parachute was needed to keep the house safe in case it had gone flying off with no one to look after it any longer. You talked to a mother in Oslo whose son was being beaten on a regular basis by the other boys in school. She told you Europe may have once been a sanctuary but no longer. Europe was like the light of a star that kept going long after the star itself had died.

  Hell, I remember you wrote about the man who invited you into his tent near Zahlé. He was bedridden with the flu and kept smelling a potted sage plant, thinking it a cure. He wouldn’t talk to you about what happened to him even though you could see the bandages around both arms and chest. His son finally whispered that his father was slowly skinned while in the notorious Tadmor Prison in Palmyra, a government torturer had spent an entire day peeling layer after layer of his father. That did not break you, but a boy having to leave home to get an education did.

  We Could All Use a Little Break

  Like you, I left home to get an education. Thirty-­something years ago, I was accepted by Harvard and a local organization offered to pay for the whole caboodle, a full eating-drinking-sleeping-studying scholarship, the prestige of which earned me my family’s blessing. Leave, leave, young man, God be with you—leave and return to us with untold riches and a smidgen of culture to edify. I left that country, left my mother; I wanted to, and also like you, I surprised everyone by not returning even though I knew I wouldn’t from the start. I transitioned in college; I changed from a depressed person to an angry one. The humiliations of my childhood—the don’t-do-this, the boys-don’t-do-that, the you-must-try-to-be-normal—all those sticks and twigs, dry kindling, burst into a furious bonfire. Everything was my family’s fault, of course it was. My cracked cup ranneth over with molten rage that no saucer could contain. My calls home became more obstreperous and less frequent. My side of the conversation consisted of various permutations of “I hate you, I loathe you, you never respected me, you never understood me, I’m unhappy and you made me so, I demand justice, I despise you.” Anger was the shape of my breath, outrage the sound of my voice. I cultivated indignation like a hothouse orchid. My mother kept insisting I follow her rules: I should do this, I couldn’t do that, I shouldn’t think I was going to get away with whatever. She made sure to explain that I was giving the whole family a bad name, that they would be ridiculed because of me and my actions and the way I was choosing to live my life.

  I had been a teenager during the age of rage and carpet-­bombing and obliteration, the age of Baader-Meinhof, Kissinger, and the rejectionist factions of the PLO. I learned much. I knew how to encase my rampant heart in iron and plod ahead, and when I left home I most certainly did. I wasted much then. Profligate, that was me, shedding many a weight, many a burden, the heaviest my past. I gave up all its chains. I wooed amnesia. In the Arabic-speaking world, dissidents and agitators attempted to discard the colonial past, and in America, I forswore the family name. I became the continuous revolution, unshackled from bourgeois constraints, living in the present. Lot’s wife was a cowardly weakling. I was no prophet’s wife. Don’t look back in anger or in sorrow. I galloped forward, focusing on the lure of the mechanical rabbit before me.

  Mistakes were made. I was rebelling against my mother and could not voice it eloquently. She used many choice expletives addressing me, and I finally called her a whore. The decision to cut me off, though, was not hers alone. Both Firas and my sister, Aida, led the charge and killed me off. Firas was the one who delivered the news: “You are dead to us.”

  In many ways, the betrayal by my siblings hurt more than that by my parents, and no wound was deeper than Mazen’s silence. The years when he did not speak to me were the worst. Mazen, my Mazen. I could not believe that he had abandoned me. We were supposed to be inseparable. All my memories included him. The earliest and brightest, indelible, was of my following him. He walked the corridor of our apartment up and down, dragging a red fire truck on a string. He told me to follow him and pretend to cover my ears while he imitated a siren: “Waa-woo, waa-woo, waa-woo.” I must have been three, if that. That was the oldest memory I had, and he was with me. If he wanted a rupture, I was willing. I was strong. I immured my heart.

  The family wanted a break, so I made it official. I changed my name legally. I would not return. I disappeared in that country of unremitting reinvention. I thought I would never ever forgive charming Mazen, but of course I did. He’s a slippery fellow, isn’t he, and cunning?

  Over the Rainbow

  Emma said she would come get me as soon as Sumaiya’s family settled in the barracks. It should not be more than fifteen minutes. The family had spent a couple of hours registering and had to wait for bed assignments. When I hung up, the little gang leader wanted to know what I wanted to see in the camp. I explained that I had to wait in the same spot until my friend came for me. Another boy asked if I wanted to go to the bathroom, and when I said no, he said I should be grateful because the public bathroom was anything but clean. He knew of a French woman who was so disturbed by the filth that she ran to her car, drove for fifteen minutes to a gas station, and used their facility. He wanted me to know my options in order for me to plan ahead.

  A young couple in neon-red volunteer vests walked up the hill, took out their phones a few feet from us. A third volunteer passing by wondered what they were doing in the camp on their time off. The young man held up his phone as explanation. The Iraqi girl tugged on my hand and pointed to a bloated cardboard sign stuck with black masking tape to the concrete wall behind us, free wi-fi stenciled on it. I asked her if she’d understood the volunteers, if she could speak English, and she nodded. Every time she looked at me she would narrow her eyes, and her chin and nose would lift, which made her look like a studious resident. Did she learn the language in school? She shook her head, raised her pale, almost indecipherable eyebrows, then spoke her first words: SpongeBob.

  Soft raindrops fell on us but were still too insubstantial to penetrate. Only the fetid pool at the bottom of the hill, next to the public bathroom, seemed affected by the drizzle. The Iraqi girl continued to cling to my hand. I glanced at my phone for the time, four in the afternoon. Must be a shift change. The area around us flooded with volunteers in different color vests coming and going. A few moments of chaos before the sun broke through.

  Newly arrived families trudged uphill carrying their belongings, pulling rolling suitcases, their voices submerged in the hullabaloo of conversations among the volunteers, the tap-tap of hard soles on harder concrete, the bustle of movement. A Syrian family ascended toward us, mother, father, three kids, the eldest a boy of perhaps twelve, his face a picture of glacial determination. A large group of young volunteers in neon-yellow vests walked next to them, boisterous and unselfconscious. One of them, a blond in her early twenties, screamed. Everyone stopped. She screamed again, pointing at the sky. “Oh my God, oh my God.” She screamed once more before she was able to form an actual sentence. “Look, it’s a rainbow,” she yelled. She tried to engage my Iraqi g
irl, kept pointing at the far sky, spoke louder in English to make herself understood, but my girl wanted nothing to do with her, wrapping her arms around my waist, clinging roughly. As the Syrian family reached us, I was able to hear what they were talking about.

  “She’s excited because she saw a rainbow,” the father said.

  The mother shook her head. The twelve-year-old boy said in a quiet voice, not realizing that I spoke his language: “She should shove that rainbow up her ass.”

  The father snickered. The mother smacked the back of his head, not violently, for they were both carrying heavy loads.

  What to Ask at a Book Reading

  You know, I had met you earlier, not officially, at a reading in a bookstore in Boystown. Later you would say you remembered Francine but not me. You signed our books. We didn’t talk much.

  It was early fall in Chicago, in the midst of a dense snowstorm, of course. You were ill prepared for the cold, making jokes about freezing sexual organs. You were funny and your reading went well, your dial turned to high charm. There, in front of a crowd of readers, behind a rickety lectern, you seemed engaged and alive, vibrant. Your hair called out for a comb, your chin for a razor, your lovely Missoni shirt for an iron. Fancy, idiosyncratic glasses teetered on the tip of your nose. Disheveled elegance you were, an alluring performance, seemingly effortless. The audience adored you as if you were the cutest puppy, all wishing to pet this most exotic of breeds. You talked and talked, divagations galore, the little prince proud of being able to hold court and attention.