The Angel of History

by Rabih Alameddine

  Satan’s Interviews

  Death

  “Forgetting is good for the soul,” Death said. “Not just good, but necessary. How do you expect them to go on living if they disremember not? We have to forget, we all do. Do you not recall the boy from Fray Bentos, Funes the Memorious? Borges claimed that the boy remembered everything, every minute, boring detail: the shape of mammatus clouds on Tuesday afternoon at two, the rotation of the waterwheel and its circumference, the color of each hair on a mare’s mane. It would take the impoverished boy a whole day to reconstruct the previous one since he could forget nothing. In the replete world of Funes there was nothing but detail. He could create nothing, invent naught. The pain of it all, the pain of not forgetting.”

  He looked around for somewhere to dispose of his shrinking cigarette. His nicotine-stained fingers had been flicking ashes, which formed an arc, a single-hued rainbow on the hardwood before him.

  “I dislike nonsmokers,” he announced as he stood up and walked toward the kitchen. He stepped solidly, claiming the parquet in the living room as his, the harlequin-patterned linoleum in the kitchen. He opened cabinet doors and slammed them shut. He kicked a folding chair that was leaning against the wall. A startled Behemoth rushed back to the closet. Death returned with a cereal bowl containing the cigarette’s remains.

  “Did you expect him to stay sane once you dredged up all he had kept interred for years?” Death asked. “You have awakened the bitter memory of what he was, what is, and, worse, what must be. He is hanging by an Atroposean thread, a pair of her scissors will be dangerous enough and you come in swinging an ax.”

  “Sanity is overrated,” Satan said.

  And Death said, “It is when a man remembers that he calls on me.”

  “Of course,” Satan said. “But enough about that. Tell me about his childhood, about Cairo.”

  “You believe the city saved him, don’t you?” Death said. “I know how you think. And I disagree. I think it would have been better for him to have remained in one of those asinine Yemeni villages where his greatest excitement would arrive every Friday: to wear a pair of Adeni shoes that went clack-clack as he walked and to take them off when he prayed at the mosque. He would be so proud as he lined them up outside with the other men’s shoes, his would look so trendy and fabulous, and that would have provided the faggot with all the happiness he could ever have wished for. He’d marry a nine-year-old virgin from the village and spend his time masturbating in the bathroom. That would have been a better life than what you stuck him with.”

  “And his nine-year-old bride would have had an easier life,” Satan said.

  “Exactly. She would have remained a virgin, an eternal blossom. We should name her.”

  “Balqees,” Satan said. “A nice Yemeni name.”

  “Lovely,” Death said. “I tell you this: every move this boy has had to make ended up causing him more anguish, and that’s just him. If we consider the other people in his life, the suffering these uprootings caused was immeasurable.”

  “Poor little Balqees.”

  “You understand nothing,” Death said.

  “So can you tell me about Cairo?”

  “Fuck Cairo.”

  Eustace

  The saint would not sit down. He walked around the two-bedroom apartment, picked up various objects, turned them around in his surprisingly delicate hands before putting them back: a small fruit bowl in the kitchen, a hand mirror in Jacob’s room, the imitation Tiffany Mission lamp on the nightstand in Odette’s. Brown eyes in a fierce, sad pugilist’s face inspected everything. He held every object carefully as if he wished to grasp the heart of the thing; he examined each, hoping to recapture a feeling. An exile’s long-anticipated return to his homeland: familiar and foreign, wondrous and disappointing.

  “We were taken from here as soon as his lover died,” Eustace said, moving from corner to corner. “Uprooted and expunged, our sea lost its shore. Once more we were judged superfluous.” He sighed as he riffled through a dresser drawer. “We were with him since he was a stripling cherub, healed him through illness, comforted him during a plague. Yet when we were purged, did he see fit to call us back? No, he condemned himself to the everyday world. And now you, adversary to God and man, see fit to ask me here, to call upon me?”

  It was Satan’s turn to sigh—a long-drawn-out sigh. “I was banished for a long time as well, but you don’t see me still nurturing grievances.”

  Tall and muscular, almost filling the entire doorway, Eustace faced the living room. He cleared his throat, raised his left eyebrow and an ample brassiere held between thumb and forefinger.

  “It belongs to the roommate,” Satan said. “I’m surprised it’s still here since she isn’t anymore.”

  “He has not seen the light, then?” Eustace said.

  “He has seen many a light and you know that,” Satan said. “You ran roughshod over his dreams. Was it all fourteen of you so-called Holy Helpers or just you? The stags, the hunt, the quarries, all so well lit. Instead of visions, Jacob is having nightmares.”

  Satan turned on the mini recorder on the coffee table. A thumbprint bloomed where he had touched the glass top. He gestured toward the seat opposite him. “Come now, let us begin.”

  “Yes, of course,” Eustace said, “commence we must,” but he did not move from under the casing, nor did he let go of the brassiere. He held it against his tunic, then strung it on his belt next to the sword.

  “I can’t believe you’d suggest that Jacob hasn’t seen the light,” Satan said. “We’re here to help the fellow. I need your attention.”

  “Why me?” Eustace said. “I wish to help, but he’s having a psychological crisis. I have little experience in that domain. Should you not begin with one of the others? Maybe Margaret or Catherine? Cyriac?”

  “I prefer to think of it as a spiritual crisis,” Satan said. “He has forgotten so much. I called you in to remind him. He wants to check into St. Francis, thinks it will be three days of rest and recreation.”

  “Francis is an idiot, and our boy is not much smarter.” Eustace rumbled across the living room, suddenly dithyrambic in his movement, and plopped down on the sagging armchair. “We must rescue him.”

  “We must,” Satan said.

  Behemoth poked his head out from behind the closet door to investigate the foot stomping. He seemed engrossed, fixed his eyes on the saint, the Roman helmet and its halo. He prostrated himself, arched his back in a languid stretch before coming into the room proper.

  “Why would he think that ending up in the hospital is going to help him?” Eustace said. “Is he blinded by depression?”

  “Horribly so.”

  “What is dark in him we must illumine, what is low, raise and support. How can I help?”

  “Tell me about Jacob,” Satan said. “What I hear he remembers, what I remember he hears. Remind him of himself.”

  “Shall I tell you from the beginning?”

  “Not necessarily,” Satan said. “Linearity can be boring. Why not recall what is best about him, what jumps out at you from your well of memory? Is there something you feel most important?”

  “There.” Eustace pointed at the floor between them, and Behemoth ambled to the spot. “Jacob prayed on his knees there. He called on me again, asked for my help, and I—no, we all came forth. He needed us.”

  “Tell me,” Satan said. “Tell Jacob.”

  “There,” Eustace said as Behemoth began to lick the old wood where he was pointing. “Jacob broke because of a drop of tainted blood—the shape of the stain was what crushed the poet.”

  “Sing,” Satan said.

  “It was the last time his partner the doctor left his bed,” Eustace said, “alive, that is. Jacob was exhausted and spent, surviving on fumes of air and methamphetamine. We too were weary. All fourteen of us could see that the doctor did not have much time left in this world. He was in that room there while Jacob tried to nap on the couch that is no longer here. The doctor
called out. Even though his voice was weak, barely perceptible to humans, it was a dog whistle for Jacob, who jumped up to walk him to the bathroom. No one understood why Jacob had not put the doctor in diapers. The doctor would have refused, of course, but Jacob could have forced him. It would have saved him so much trouble and so much detergent. As Jacob was leading him back to the bed, he noticed that the doctor had a cut on the sole of his left foot, a minor wound, but blood too craves air, and it surged. Every step of the injured foot stained the hardwood floor. As an experienced caregiver, Jacob didn’t panic. Once he had his lover in bed, he cleaned the cut, bandaged it, and filled a pail with soapy water.”

  “As if he were back in that accursed Catholic school his father sent him to,” Satan said.

  “Exactly!”

  “As it was with the nuns,” Satan said, “so will it ever be.”

  “He had washed floors on his knees before, but he’d never had to remove blood. He began to scrub the stains, sidling from one to the next, feeling more desperate and lonely after each, until he arrived at the seventh.”

  “There?” Satan pointed to where Behemoth searched for blood wintering in the floor’s cracks.

  “There,” Eustace said. “That stain was shaped unlike the rest, or you might say Jacob saw it differently. To him, it looked like a kerosene lamp, the one in the old rectory in Beirut where with an old, almost depleted click pen he wrote his first poems. He studied the stain for ten minutes, maybe more, as if he were sitting Zen and contemplating its mysteries. Then he broke—he wept, prayed, called us. As it was during the Black Death of the Middle Ages, when a sufferer called upon us, we appeared—we arrived, and he was curled up on the floor, fetal, enveloped in sorrow that should not be borne. We helped bear his grief. Agathius was the first to the floor as usual. Margaret wiped his tears. Vitus and I cleaned. I got on my knees and began to scrub the plague out, but when I tried to clean the lamp, he begged me to allow him some time with it. I must say that I would not have seen anything in that stain, let alone a kerosene lamp. It was a mere blob.”

  Behemoth’s tongue would not slow down, as if the cat intended to uncover layers and layers through licking.

  “Jacob saw the light of his childhood,” Eustace said. “He wanted to see it. Blessed lamp, an ordinary one with a slippery worm of a wick that kept sliding back into the fuel reservoir at its bottom. He would have to open the lamp and pull the kerosene-soaked wick out with a pair of tweezers. The shapely glass allowed him to see its inner workings—see through to the eternal secret. For the boy, the lamp illumined and mystified. It shed light and flickering shadows, warded off night demons and introduced gnostic ones.”

  “You appeared,” Satan said, “the fourteen saints in all your glory.”

  “Well, yes, but I was speaking metaphorically,” Eustace said. “You see, the boy may have been indoctrinated with more than one religion, but it was at that time, in that space, that he encountered spirit, the most fragile of all, as delicate as dandelion fluff. Accompanied by unreliable light, the boy read and wrote. In the old lamp’s cocoon he found a safe space, his secret garden. He left all that when he finally immigrated to America. The lamp was a shining allegory of what he lost, what he abandoned, dishonored.”

  At the Clinic

  Waiting

  Ferrigno took the shy young trans man first, the contrast in size was like a Coleridge poem to a Dickinson, and even though Ferrigno carried a clipboard, he didn’t have to peruse it or call out a name, he just nodded and was followed out of the waiting room, a strange form of power dynamics that reminded me of how uncomfortable I felt in gay bars because I always thought I was missing the visual cues that the men were exchanging, not that many sent signals my way, yet I wished I had been more adept at reading gay semaphores when I was younger, too late for me now. They’re writing songs of love, Satan sang, but not for me, and I tried to shut him up, to no avail, he kept asking me, Are you going to do the poor, poor pitiful me routine, because if you are, I’ll just zone out for the next fifteen minutes.

  It has been getting worse, Doc, I don’t seem to be able to cut him off, I am all wound with adders who with cloven tongues do hiss me into madness, it wasn’t always this bad, I went along for years doing rather well, didn’t hear his voice, but then one day he reappeared, and he’s been getting more demanding, more irksome, hissing, hissing, and I get headaches, I fear the return of the great migraine storms, I need a break, Doc, I need a break.

  The man in the corner conspired softly with his hand, whispered of conflicts and intrigues and possible plans of action, though his hand remained tongue-tied as usual, unsure how to reply, and the bespectacled lady observed me while pretending not to. The peal of a church bell shocked all three of us, rang out of my jeans pocket, one round of titong-tong-titong-tong-titong. Bespectacled lady, her gray hair tucked behind her ears, glanced up at the NO CELL PHONES sign on the left wall, then back at me with nothing if not deeply chiding eyes, returned to staring intently at her own phone while I hurried to turn the ringer off, and Satan said, Just like you to have a church bell as annunciation, maybe you should wear a garlic necklace to ward me off.

  I knew what he was doing, he wanted me to go crazy so he could have full rein, he was afraid that I would get rid of him as I did the last and only time I stayed for three days in St. Francis after you all died, he was out of my life then and I was able to function once more, go to work, hang out with friends, have a life, for crying out loud. Are you sure it was me, Satan asked, it could have been just your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety voice, maybe your fourteen saints, maybe you heard His Mightiness himself, or his son who died for your sins, or maybe the prophet of your true religion, Mo’ Ho’, or one of the first caliphs, with you it could have been anybody, yet you insist it was the ruler of this world, the tempter, me, I know you know that wasn’t the case, but still you choose to believe, I am here now, not going anywhere, get used to it. As smoke is driven away, I told him, so will you be driven, as wax melts before a fire, so will your wickedness perish, and he laughed like a demon.

  Odette’s text simply asked where I was, but it was in all capital letters, which meant she was furious, happy, or worried, and we can safely assume that it was the last in this case since I had texted her two hours earlier asking if she could mind Behemoth for three days because I was thinking of going on a mini vacation, but she knew me better than anyone else and probably figured I was lying. You never met Odette, Doc, she’s my closest friend, my confidante, and my funniest person in the universe, she moved in a couple of years after you left because she needed a place and I thought it would be good to save on rent. She ended up staying because we were ideal roommates. Are you going to explain to him about cell phone technologies next, asked Satan, interrupting me as usual, because you know he isn’t listening, he’s dead.

  Jacob’s Journals

  Mother Dreaming

  I woke to the sound of my mother singing an old Yemeni folk song, one of my favorites, and my heart was uplifted until I began to consider that she rarely woke before me, and once I did, the evanescent song faded into black. Neither my mother nor her song could survive the light of my day, I wak’d, she fled, and day brought back my night. Orange light pressed on my bedroom window.

  I know, Doc, I know, my sanity is deserting me. Have you ever wondered about the noun desert and the verb? They’re derived from the same root, left behind. Since I began to drop the pail in the well of my memories, I’ve had no rest, no slack for that rope. Whoosh fell the bucket and up came salty recollections. Remember the snow globe you kept mocking me for saving, for being so attached to, the one remaining memento of my mother, yet you kept telling me to throw it away, to discard it in some trash heap? I had a sentimental heart, you said, the souvenir was much too ugly, and it was, of all things, a snow globe from Stockholm, of all places. Well, your horrid mother stole it. She did. I don’t want to think about that. I do not recall when my mother acquired that snow globe. What I do recal
l is that sometime after my eighth birthday, my mother began to dream of Stockholm and its long winters.

  One evening, a lanky, tall Swede with hair the color of dry hay in high summer, almost as bright as the thin gold necklace he wore, walked across the salon and held out his arm for her. It was a performance, but still, it was the rare client who performed the role of a gentleman, everyone was dazzled. My mother looked around to make sure that he meant her, and only her, she even looked at the wall behind her, at the large carved figurehead of an unknown beast, openmouthed as if caught in mid-scream, with horns and dark brown eyes. No, it wasn’t the beast the Swede was after. When she was assured that she was the one he wanted, she stopped being able to see anything but his eyes. She got up off the purple ottoman, hooked her elbow in his, and luckily she was wearing high heels that evening or she would have had to tiptoe. His shirt was unbuttoned down to his belly button, his dangling gold chain reaching just a hair above the shirt’s V. He romanced her as everyone watched, then took her into the room and seduced her, and did not leave till the morning cock crowed.