Koolaids

by Rabih Alameddine

  Hizballah would fire rockets into northern Israel, hoping to hit something. They actually begin running away before the rockets hit anything. If a rocket lands in Israel and not southern Lebanon, they declare victory. If it actually hits something, like some poor sucker’s house, they declare complete victory. This is not an uncommon tactic among Arabs. Assad is called the Hero of October by the Syrians, based on his performance in the October war of 1973. You would think losing that war would not make one a hero, but he did give the Israelis a scare, attacking them on Yorn Kippur, so he is the Hero of October.

  The Israelis fire back. They use heavier weapons, but they too are afflicted with the Ya Rabbi Tegi Fi Aino virus. They hit everything but Hizballah targets. In all their attacks, not one Hizballah fighter has fallen, not one Hizballah target. They have, however, killed many southern boys who might have one day grown up to be Hizballah fighters, so it evens out in the end.

  So there you have it, a brief history of the Middle East version of The Art of War. Who needs poor old Sun?

  …

  Death comes in many shapes and sizes, but it always comes. No one escapes the little tag on the big toe.

  The four horsemen approach.

  The rider on the red horse says, “This good and faithful servant is ready. He knoweth war.”

  The rider on the black horse says, “This good and faithful servant is ready. He knoweth plague.”

  The rider on the pale horse says, “This good and faithful servant is ready. He knoweth death.”

  All three together chant:

  When the sun shall be darkened,

  When the stars shall be thrown down,

  When the mountains shall be set moving,

  When the pregnant camels shall be neglected,

  When the savage beasts shall be mustered,

  When the seas shall be set boiling,

  When the souls shall be coupled,

  When the buried infant shall be asked for what sin she was slain,

  When the scrolls shall be unrolled,

  When the heaven shall be stripped off,

  When Hell shall be set blazing,

  When Paradise shall be brought nigh,

  Then shall a soul know what it has produced.

  “What the hell is this?” the rider on the white horse asks. “Those are not my words. I never said that. You guys are reading from the wrong fucking book, you idiots. That’s the Qur’an. You’re not allowed to read from that when you’re with me. The Bible is my book. What the fuck am I supposed to do with you guys? Pregnant camels? Pregnant camels? We’re in America now. Who cares about stupid camels anyway?”

  The cantankerous rider on the white horse leads the other three lemmings away.

  I would give anything for a good night’s sleep.

  …

  If I had my life over again, I would form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs. You might as well drink Kool-Aid.

  Muriel Spark wrote that. Then again, she probably didn’t. I did. I may have read it in Memento Mori. How could I, though? She is British. They don’t have Kool-Aid. I wrote that, not poor deluded Muriel.

  How would you like to go through life with a name like Muriel?

  …

  Mohammad had a show in DC in 1988. Like most Lebanese, I had heard of him, but had never seen his work. I had met his sister, Nawal, once, though. I really did not know what to expect, having never followed modern art. Most paintings in contemporary museums completely baffled me; the sculptures and installations, I would have thrown out with my garbage. Artistically, I have been indoctrinated in Lebanon. The art movements reached their peak with the Impressionists and have been on a quick decline ever since. Give me Monet or give me death.

  I went to the opening reception with my lover, Mark. He was much more up-to-date on modern painting. It was crowded. We could not see all the paintings at once because of all the people. Mark led me to one of the paintings. We stood in front of it. It was stunning. I did not want to move. I kept looking at it for a couple of minutes, when an effeminate young man came and stood beside us.

  “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I replied.

  He told us his name. Jack, I think it was. He was with the gallery. I liked him. Unlike most salesmen, he made no bones about the fact he was trying to sell us a painting. He said Mohammad’s paintings were already in some of the best collections in the country. They had just sold a painting to a museum, but he couldn’t tell us which one. We had never asked. I told him I would love to have the painting, but I probably could not afford it. I asked about the price. He quoted an exorbitant sum. It was more than our annual income before taxes. We laughed together. I did like him. He admitted he was still new at the job. We talked some more about the paintings.

  “I love his abstractions more than his realistic paintings,” he said.

  “I have never seen his abstract paintings,” I said.

  Both Mark and Jack looked at me strangely. “These are abstract paintings, dear,” Mark said.

  “Oh, really?” I was embarrassed. I really did not know much about art. “I thought if you could tell what they are, they are not abstract.”

  “Can you tell what these are?” Mark asked. “They are all just paintings with irregular rectangles.”

  “Oh sure, but they are sides of our houses. That’s what they look like in our villages. He painted them beautifully. I can see the stones clearly. That’s how the stones look back home. Exactly that yellow color. All the other color highlights in each painting are different because of light conditions.”

  Jack excused himself, saying he should get the director to talk to us. I sounded like an expert. I thought it was clear as day. That is why I found the paintings beautiful. They were of my home village. They were of every village, Druze, Christian, or Muslim. He had captured Lebanon. They were so beautiful. Mohammad, by placing these large paintings around the gallery, had turned the place into a Lebanese village. Finally, someone was telling the tale of my home. He did not skip over it.

  We heard the sound of raucous laughter. Mohammad walked over to us, accompanied by Jack and another man, probably the director. I recognized Mohammad right away. He was what we would call cursed. He was dark, looked like an Arab. In Lebanon, that’s a curse. He had a beard and his hair was disheveled. He had a smile that was contagious.

  “You had to ruin it, didn’t you?” he said in Arabic.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I thought everybody would see what the paintings were when they saw them. Nobody did, so I didn’t tell them. Makes you wonder about these Americans.”

  He shook my hand.”Mohammad,” he said. No last name. “Samir Bashar,” I said. “And this is . . .” I wanted to say lover. I did not know how in Arabic. His eyes understood. “Habibi is close enough,” he said smiling. “This is my lover, Mark.” I said it in French.

  “If you had told me what these paintings were about,” the director interrupted, “I would have promoted the exhibit completely differently.”

  “Put one of your dots on this painting,” Mohammad told the director. “I want them to have it.”

  “But . . .” The director was stuttering.

  “I’ll send you the painting you liked last year. You can sell that one.”

  “Wonderful.” The director placed a red dot sticker next to the painting.

  “You can come pick this painting up when the show is over,” Mohammad told me.

  “I can’t,” I argued. “This is very gen
erous, but we can’t take it.” I could see the look of pure delight on Mark’s face. I was glad he couldn’t understand what I was saying.

  “I will hear none of it,” Mohammad said. “This is now your painting.” Tradition, and manners, required I refuse it twice more. It was so beautiful.

  “I can’t take this,” I said. “This is too much. We don’t deserve it.”

  “Nonsense. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  “This is too much.”

  “Do not disgrace me by refusing my gift.”

  “Thank you so much,” I said. “I will place it in the most honored place in my house. How long are you staying in DC? You must honor us by coming to dinner. How about tomorrow night?”

  “You really don’t have to,” he said.

  “We would love to have you for dinner.” He had to give me one more chance to renege.

  “I don’t want to impose.”

  “I insist.”

  “That would be wonderful. Tomorrow it is.”

  It is ingrained.

  …

  Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

  Paul Theroux was inebriated, peeing in the fireplace, when he said that. After reading one of his books, you can tell he hasn’t contemplated death. Am I right, or what?

  No, Jackson Pollock was peeing in the fireplace. Paul Theroux wrote books.

  …

  Scott said he wanted to be immortal. He wanted to be cremated. He wanted me to use his ashes in a painting.

  I was unable to do it for a long time. I had always made my own paints, so the technical aspect of his request was not difficult. I could not bring myself to do it. I tried to convince myself that I had done my part in his immortality project. I had painted five portraits of him, one of which was already in a major collection.

  It was midnight when I started the painting. I ground the ashes in linseed oil. I laid down a black ground. I painted a lotus blossom with the ashes in the center, and nothing else on the painting. It was a muddy painting because of the medium, but I made sure the blossom was beautifully drawn.

  It became the centerpiece of my own collection.

  …

  June 17th, 1996

  Dear Diary,

  I am not sure I can stand this city anymore. If I never see another cellular phone for the rest of my life, it would be too soon. Everybody has one and everybody uses them all the time. It is so irritating. We went to a restaurant tonight and phones just kept ringing. Every table averaged about three phones. Not a minute went by without one phone ringing. The ringers are all set to weird songs. You are nobody if you don’t own a cellular. I refuse to touch one. I heard a fight erupted at the Rabelais two nights ago and the men started hitting each other with their cellular phones. One man needed seven stitches over one eye.

  …

  Fatima felt something bad was about to happen. It was a feeling in her bones. Today was going to be a bad day. April 13, 1975. She wished it was over. She rode the bus with other Palestinians that day. She wanted to get home and lock herself in.

  She heard on the news that an unsuccessful attempt was made on the life of Pierre Gemayel a couple of hours before. She knew that meant trouble. She didn’t like the man because of his constant antagonistic rhetoric, but she did not wish him dead. He was a troublemaker. Gemayel was a Maronite leader and founder of the Phalangist Party, which had its own militia. It was going to be trouble.

  The bus was passing through Ain El Rummanneh when it was stopped. She looked out the window and saw men with guns, wearing sacks with eye holes. She started shaking. They asked everybody to get out of the bus. She followed. The armed men lined the passengers along the bus. She noticed some passersby stopped to figure out what was happening. One of the masked men fired a warning shot in the air and the street emptied. One of the armed men asked if there was anybody on the bus who was not Palestinian. A passenger said his mother was Lebanese. The man with the sack shot him in the head at point-black range, calling his mother a whore.

  She was getting hysterical. She lost count of how many people they had killed by the time the gunman came to her. She was on her knees. She begged for mercy. The sack asked her if she had any children. “Not yet,” she sobbed. She wanted to beg some more, but he interrupted her. “Well, we can’t have you producing more assholes now, can we?”

  He shot her.

  Twenty-eight Palestinians were killed on that bus.

  The war has started. Buckle up. It is going to be a bumpy ride.

  …

  By the fireplace, on a calm and lonely night, Julio and I sat drinking mate. Our love of mate was one of the many things we had in common, since both Lebanese and Argentineans drank it. Another thing we both had in common was neither one of us could write very well. But what the hell, we sure could talk when we wanted to.

  “Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias?” Cortázar asked me. I realized he was depressed as usual. He never seemed to be able to pull himself out of it. I held back my first impulse to scream, “Snap out of it!” I had to calm down, create a moment of calm in response to his latest crisis.

  “We create Eden to recreate the only moment of calm we really ever knew,” I said wisely. “Life is hard, crazy. We long for the nine months of calm. We want to be back in the womb.”

  I realized I hit a nerve. Julio’s left eye was nervously fluttering again. So many tics, this man had.

  “Reason is only good to mummify reality in moments of calm or analyze its future storms, never to resolve a crisis of the moment.”

  It was a good thing nobody was recording our conversation. I am not sure Julio would appreciate others finding out how he behaved when he was around me, how his mind worked in my presence. A disinterested observer might think the last sentence he uttered came out of the blue. He said it, however, because he knew I could follow his mind’s inner working better than he could. I knew what he was about to say and was completely ready for him.

  “You’re having another crisis, Julio,” I said. “Did you take your medicine today?”

  “And these crises that most people think of as terrible, as absurd, I personally think they serve to show us the real absurdity, the absurdity of an ordered and calm world. But does anybody see this? No, they want Atlantis.”

  “It’s a good thing a mother’s vagina contracts after delivery or everybody would try to crawl back in,” I told him calmly. “And then we grow, and the option is no longer available to us, yet we desperately yearn for it even more. You should write a story titled ‘Return to Uterus the Great. ‘”

  “Precisely, old man,” he was now rambling. “What is war or disease, if not a revolt against a calm and ordered world, if not an example of the horror of a calm and ordered world? Would you rather have a world of AIDS or a world of fifties sitcoms? Those are your options. But does anybody listen? Life lives for itself, whether we like it or not.”

  I had an evil grin on my face when I told him, “Clarity is an intellectual requirement, nothing more. You insist that dialectics can only set our closet in order in moments of calm, yet here you are, trying to create a moment of calm, a moment of clarity in your current crisis, by using the only thing you know, dialectics.”

  I saw the reaction in his eyes. They looked at me, grasped the genius of what I said, tried to make sense of it, got this glazed look, and then his mind froze, just like a computer screen when it has too much information. His head tilted. He was out like a light.

  Poor Julio. I try not to do this to him, but he’s just too easy.

  …

  Joe and Christopher celebrated their seventeenth anniversary, in the presence of friends, by exchanging their IV lines. That celebra
tion was the first time I met them. I was invited by Joe. They had bought a couple of my paintings years ago. Joe wrote me, suggesting my presence would be a delightful surprise to his partner.

  I was welcomed into their lives at the eleventh hour. They both died within three months of that delectable night.

  I arrived at their house sometime later to find Christopher sleeping, and Joe in a foul mood. I tried to figure out what had happened, but did not understand much of what he was saying. All I gathered was the fact Christopher had attempted to reopen the lines of communications with his estranged family. The entire family were devout Christians and it was causing problems. Joe was unable to elaborate more, something to do with a calamari soft-shell taco. I was bewildered.

  He showed me a letter he had just finished typing to his brother-in-law. It elucidated the situation, but not by much:

  …

  Dennis.

  I thought about calling and decided faxing you would be a better way to let you know what I want to tell you about your call to Christopher yesterday. I don’t know if you realized it, but your call was greatly distressing to Christopher. I want you to know this will not happen again. It will not happen again because I will not allow it to happen again.

  You may not realize it, but Christopher is dying. For someone who has seen him every day for the last sixteen years, this is very apparent. For someone who has seen him only once or twice, it may not be so. Christopher is very vulnerable and also very polite. He listened to what you had to say yesterday. I am not so vulnerable and also not so polite. The kind of call you made to him yesterday will not be tolerated. I will not have you calling here and upsetting him.

  Let me make a couple of things very clear. Neither Christopher, nor I, are here to be your HIV or AIDS education service. If you had questions about the safety of Janice or Jennifer eating a taco that Christopher had eaten from, you could and should have called your local AIDS Hotline or the CDC Hotline. Knowing the facts about AIDS is your responsibility. Janice and Jennifer are adults. If they had any reservations about eating the taco, they could have simply said, “No thanks,” or asked if it was safe.