Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “I haven’t seen you in so long,” Auntie Lulu said.

  It had only been three weeks since I’d seen her. In the last year she’d seldom left her apartment—a musty apartment that had furtive yet insistent dog smells but no dog. Auntie Fadia and my mother visited her daily, of course, and my mother insisted I accompany her at least once a month. I didn’t think Auntie Lulu enjoyed my visits much. I was the madeleine of her failed dreams: I was Walid’s best friend, and his brother’s first girlfriend.

  “How are your classes?”

  I was taken aback, as was Auntie Fadia, whose mouth momentarily sagged. My mother straightened as if her stool had magically morphed into a high-backed chair. I had graduated three years earlier. Walid would have too, since we were the same age. My mother clearly wanted to say something, but Auntie Fadia was quicker. “Drink your coffee, my love.” She handed Auntie Lulu half a mandarin.

  I was the first to understand that Walid had disappeared. It wasn’t a rational understanding by any means. It just hit me at the sushi boat restaurant, as if my soul understood first and my mind followed. Walid was a Heinlein fan (I couldn’t stand him) and he loved the Martian word grok, which meant comprehending intimately and completely, understanding on a deeper, cellular level. I grokked that Walid was gone.

  That December day began with mournful rain streaking my window. I was awakened by my mother asking if I knew why Walid hadn’t come home the night before. He didn’t show up for classes, either, and when I returned from university that afternoon, my mother dragged me to Auntie Lulu’s for the first of many interrogations. As Auntie Lulu spoke, all I could concentrate on was her mouth, her lipstick having been applied quite unevenly. I tried to calm her and my mother. Walid was a man, a college sophomore, not a child. He probably wanted to spend the night studying or something, and then his cell phone battery died.

  Yet when I sat down at the restaurant and saw the stupid connected boats going round and round endlessly, I began to weep. I felt so embarrassed that I ran outside and stood in the rain, heaving and choking on my tears, while being watched by a gaggle of parking valet boys huddled under an awning. I wasn’t able to stop crying, so I didn’t go back into the restaurant.

  When we were younger, Walid used to fold an entire newspaper into squares and make cutouts, but instead of an accordion of little figures holding hands, his were a series of small boats coupled stem to stern.

  I didn’t know what had happened or where he was, but I knew he was gone. He had left his favorite jacket, a dark gray parka, hanging on the honeycomb wall-mounted coat rack in the foyer. Something strange must have happened for him not to take it with him.

  Auntie Lulu hadn’t moved his jacket, of course, hanging other coats around it. She went into the foyer every morning and kissed it. She must have done so this morning too.

  Auntie Fadia lit two Marlboros in her mouth and passed one, rimmed with pale lipstick, to Auntie Lulu. “I’m so happy you’re out of mourning,” Auntie Fadia said. “A year is too much. I understand why you chose to do it for so long. I’m with you, my love. But I say six months—six months is more than enough. I loved my husband, everyone will vouch for that, but I couldn’t keep wearing black.”

  “I didn’t mind the black,” Auntie Lulu said. “I just didn’t want people to…” She stopped midsentence, midthought. She didn’t look at us but stared at the half-wall before her. Had she looked above it, she’d have seen an unrelenting blue sheet of sky, and below it, our noisy Beiruti street.

  “I think it’s better that you took it off.” My mother held her friend’s hand. “He’d have wanted you to. Your husband hated black.”

  The three of us didn’t need a map to understand that Auntie Lulu meant she didn’t want to keep wearing black because people would think she was mourning her son as well. If she wore colors, he was still alive somewhere.

  “And don’t wear those black nylons anymore,” Auntie Fadia said, leaning over. She put her hand on Auntie Lulu’s knee but pulled it back, shaking her head. “Although they do cover a lot.”

  “Fadia!” my mother admonished.

  “What? Don’t look at me like that. I tell the truth, you know me. I think we could all use a little depilation. That’s all I’m saying. Am I lying? Tell me. No, I most certainly am not. We all need a good pedicure as well, especially if we’re going to wear our sandals. Am I right? Am I right? This evening we’ll all go to the salon. Just the essentials, that’s all. Top to bottom.”

  “Is that a good idea?” Auntie Lulu crushed her cigarette and reached for another from Auntie Fadia’s pack. She hadn’t brought her own.

  “Yes, actually,” my mother said, “it’s an excellent idea. I certainly need it.”

  “And you know, my love,” Auntie Fadia said, “unshaved legs are contagious. If we don’t do something about yours, who knows what will happen to mine? It’s even worse with unpedicured nails.” She lifted her bare foot in the air and pointed at her scarlet toenails. “Look, look. The color is chipping as we speak. We need an emergency intervention.”

  In spite of herself, Auntie Lulu grinned. My mother laughed, and Auntie Fadia, who always enjoyed her own joke, laughed too. The crackling falsetto, the undulating throat.

  “Girls’ night out,” my mother said.

  “We can be young again,” Auntie Fadia added.

  At sixty-two, Auntie Fadia was the eldest, and she wasn’t aging gracefully. She fought every slight sign of decay with vigor and bitterness. Her makeup kept getting thicker and her fashions more adolescent. Even so, she looked younger and fresher than Auntie Lulu, ten years her junior, who was aging without bitterness and with obvious resignation. Her eyes had turned incurious a long time ago. Her elbows collected as many furrows as a walnut. She’d become a paltry imitation of what she once was. Her son’s vanishing was a vampire. Fair was foul, and foul was fair.

  Walid was born a week after I was. When they married, my parents moved into this building, which had been handed down to Auntie Fadia by her father. When Auntie Lulu discovered that she and my mother were in the same state and stage, she ascended the stairs with a stool and parked it in front of our apartment. They became fast and close friends.

  I was my mother’s first and only, and Walid was his mother’s second and last. We attended the same kindergarten and the same grade school, and took the same classes at the university before he disappeared. Our friendship was taken for granted by all. He was my brother. In fact, when he caught his own brother kissing me in this same stairwell—Tarek and I had stupidly thought that the half-wall would protect us from prying eyes—he broke in on us by yelling, “But she’s your sister!” I was fourteen at the time and Tarek was older. He wasn’t in any way family; at seventeen, he was almost another species.

  Walid sat with me on the bus to our elementary school and on the way back. He walked at my side to our high school. He sat next to me in every class, during every lecture, and while we ate our watery lunches in the school cafeteria.

  We read Macbeth for English class when we were sixteen. In our drafty classroom, huddling shoulder to shoulder, with flickering fluorescents and slanted sunbeams for light, we shared a raggedy, dog-eared copy. “When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?” A stampede of wildebeests or of militiamen couldn’t have stopped our giggling in class on our first encounter with the three witches.

  At home we sat on the stairs, our usual seats six steps above the coffee klatch, and when my mother demanded to know what we were laughing about, Walid recited the opening of Macbeth. My mother, the English professor, took up the second witch’s lines: “When the hurlyburly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”

  Our mothers loved being called witches, but not Auntie Fadia, who declared that witches were ugly, as she most certainly wasn’t.

  “We are witches. Shakespeare didn’t say they were ugly,” my mother insisted as she poured her coven a second cup. “Try some of my witch’s brew.”

  But
two other mothers of students in the class objected, one a Sunni like us, the other a Maronite. Separately, they called our English teacher to register their horror at their offspring being taught about witches, which apparently was an insult to both Islam and Christianity. The English teacher instructed us to white-out the word witches and write in weird sisters. “In some folios,” she said, “they were called the three weird sisters.”

  “I will not have it,” my mother fumed when she found out. “This is a betrayal.” Our English teacher had been her student only three years earlier. “You don’t white-out Shakespeare. I’m going to have a talk with that ingrate. Capitulating to complaining idiots.” She swallowed the hot coffee too quickly and coughed. “I am not a weird sister.”

  “Me neither,” said Auntie Fadia. “Even a witch is better than a weird sister.”

  Walid didn’t begin to be weird until college. He was normal—well, how normal is anyone?—and then somehow, as a freshman, when no one was looking, God crept into his life. As a teenager, he was as sex-obsessed as any Beiruti boy. He once forgot to log off a pornographic site, and when I sat down to use his computer, I was blasted with a picture of a man and woman in an unsustainable position. He rushed to turn the image off, apologized, and swore it was only curiosity that made him look. He wasn’t averse to cussing or mischief. When we were thirteen, we pilfered two bottles of beer from his parents’ fridge and pretended to enjoy them. Normal, he was a normal Lebanese boy.

  Two streets away behind our building, there used to be a small copse of pine trees that was leveled to make room for upscale twin high rises five years ago. One day, Walid and I collected ripe pinecones, hid them in our pockets and underwear, and snuck up to the roof of our building. We tried to hit people with them and missed by a mile. We got in trouble, of course, and our punishment was spending the weekend confined to our rooms. It was terrible for both of us. He was normal.

  He had the perfect Tintin collection, not one issue missing. It was the envy of his friends. I was startled to hear Auntie Lulu mention it this morning in connection with her daughter-in-law. “Tarek, may God forgive him, must have told his wife about it, and avaricious bitch that she is, she wants her hands on it.” “That ugly witch,” declaimed Auntie Fadia. “Hateful,” my mother said, “just hateful.”

  “She went into his room.”

  “She did what?” cried Auntie Fadia. “That hyena doesn’t deserve to live.”

  “She went into his room while I was in the kitchen and looked through his stuff. I was mortified. I wanted to scream, but all I could do was unleash tears in front of her. The worst part is that I had to pretend to be mollified by her fake kindness. She thinks I need to be stronger, face facts. Facts? She wants me to give his collection to my future grandchildren.”

  “And where are they?” my mother asked.

  “Exactly.” Auntie Lulu nodded her head energetically. “Exactly. Where are my grandchildren? Do you think I’m allowed to ask her? The last time I mentioned it, I got a talking-to from Tarek. I hurt her sensitive feelings.”

  “Hyenas don’t have feeling,” Auntie Fadia said. “Their laughter is only pretense.”

  “I can’t bring up the subject of grandchildren because she’s so sensitive, but she can when she wants something.” Auntie Lulu paused, and just before her eyes went blank again she said, “And you, my girl, should have been the one to marry him.”

  “I’m afraid of heights,” I said, regretting the words as soon as they left my throat. My mother glared with fiery disapproval. Auntie Fadia looked appalled; her eyebrows rose and thinned. Auntie Lulu looked oblivious and impassive. On her wrist, she wore a commemorative watch that her husband had given her for their engagement. It ticked no longer, keeping the static time of long ago.

  Tarek was my boyfriend, if you could call him that, for barely a year, leaving me for pastures more svelte and ripe when he started college. In the time we were allegedly together, we never went further than kissing, and that only four or five times. We just liked the idea of discovery and the paradigm of dating. We had nothing in common. After all, the most original thought that had sprung from Tarek’s mind, like a spring draft, was that he could wear a shirt that was darker than his tie and carry it off. He went and married a girl whose father was a war profiteer, a politician of course, and one of the richest men in Lebanon. For the wedding, the bride and her father arrived in a hot-air balloon. Even though the witches knew it was coming—the montgolfière, as the war profiteer was wont to call it—they were horrified as they watched the contraption approach. Had they had any magical powers, they’d have dispatched lightning bolts or a swarm of locusts and celebrated the balloon’s plunge into the Mediterranean.

  You would think that her son’s marrying rich would have made Auntie Lulu happy. Tarek wanted to shower her with everything she’d ever desired.

  “I want to move her into a nice apartment,” he told me not too long ago as we sat in a gaudily decorated Mexican restaurant, a windowless basement with bright tropical colors reflected in floating cigarette smoke and motes. Even though we were sitting next to each other, he practically had to scream to be heard. Shakira Night was popular and loud. “Is that wrong of me? An apartment with a doorman and a maid’s room would make life easier. She said she wouldn’t know what to do with a maid. She just doesn’t want to leave your mother.”

  “It’s her home.” I tried to drink my blended margarita as fast as I could. He was unbearable when I was sober.

  “I think she doesn’t want to move because she believes Walid will return one day,” he said, “and if she isn’t there, he won’t know where to find her.”

  Gulp, slurp, gulp.

  “She still thinks he’ll come back.” He sighed, took a sip of his own margarita. He was pale around his red-veined eyes.

  I poured another from the pitcher. I knew what would come next. He’d been asking the same question ever since the vanishing.

  “Do you think he got weird because of us, because of what he saw?” I was still sober, so he was still pathetic. He wanted an explanation and I wanted to get drunk quickly without having a brain freeze. He was stuck in his desperate need to make sense of things, trying to believe that witnessing a brother kissing a girl could be a traumatic experience.

  When Walid and his faith became intimate during his first year of college, he developed a few idiosyncrasies. He stopped shaving, but that wasn’t much of a marker. He wasn’t hirsute, and it took him quite a while to grow a beard, so he didn’t exactly stop shaving as much as he never really began to. The disturbing tic, the real marker, was his sudden inability to look at a provocatively dressed woman. He didn’t have a problem with me, of course, but if one of my friends turned up showing a bit of cleavage, his eyes fell to his shoelaces, gravity overwhelming his gaze. He didn’t know how to respond if said friend talked to him. This was a boy who grew up adoring the cleavage Wonder Woman shared with Diana Prince. We had a French teacher in high school who wore a push-up bra that pushed up so effectively she could probably have stacked Racine’s complete works on her bosom. Walid used to sit up front with a dopey grin on his face, his head swaying as if he were listening to a symphony and Madame Laffont’s brassiere were the conductor’s baton.

  It wasn’t one thing that changed him, one thing that could be explained. It wasn’t childhood trauma, the World Trade Center bombing, the sight of his brother kissing me, the invasion of Iraq, charismatic clerics, excessive masturbation, or Israeli crimes.

  Auntie Lulu rarely asked why Walid disappeared. She was more interested in where he was. She scoured every corner of Lebanon looking for him. She went to every police station in the country, literally, and forced the police to take her into every cell to make sure. She visited hospitals and morgues; held her breath and peeked under many a sheet. She secured the help of every sectarian party in her search. She made a high official of Hezbollah swear on the Koran that none of his people knew where her son was and that he’d inform her if the sit
uation changed. She begged politicians subservient to Syria to tell her if her son had been abducted and thrown into one of its numerous secret prisons. She drove south to meet unifil officers who might know whether the Israelis had kidnapped her son. She called on the imam her son had been studying with and made him feel so guilty that he tried desperately to help her locate Walid. He arranged a clandestine meeting with a crazy cleric who recruited fighters for Iraq—Auntie Lulu insisted she needed to hear his words directly—but the cleric didn’t know anything, either. After a year of this, her husband pleaded with her to stop. She kept on going.

  Auntie Fadia or my mother accompanied her on many of these excursions. After each one, my mother came back drained and frustrated. If I was home, no matter how tired she was, she’d interrogate me as if I were a disaffected citizen of her country. Did he tell me anything that might explain? Did he have friends that I hadn’t told them about? Was I sworn to any secrets?

  One day, some twenty-something months after his disappearance, Auntie Lulu stopped looking and began to wait. Waiting aged her. Waiting made her the woman who sat on our landing this morning, eyes averted, and said, “I saw him,” another non sequitur. Her unmanicured fingernail scratched at an imaginary spot of dirt on her burgundy blouse. Out, out…

  ‘”Who?” Auntie Fadia asked. “Who did you see?”

  “I’m not crazy.” Auntie Lulu wouldn’t look up. “I saw Walid two days ago in his room. Don’t freak out. I know it wasn’t him. I’m not an imbecile. I knew it wasn’t him even while I was seeing him. He was younger than when he left. I saw him. I talked to him. He disappeared again.”