The Book of Collateral Damage

by Sinan Antoon

  Mariah was surprised that evening when she saw the bottle of orange-flavored milk in the fridge, and I told her the story.

  People of my time, do you know of secret thoughts?

  I know, but I’m not going to reveal:

  Neither my birth nor my old age are my choice

  Nor how long I’ll live. So what choice do I have?

  My life is a torment and death is a relief

  And every son born of woman is a prisoner in the soil

  I see myself there.

  It’s strange that you can’t go back to the place you long to go back to. But you go back, under duress, to the place you long to escape. That has often happened to me in my waking state. They wrap me up and jab me with a needle, and when I wake up I find myself there. It still happens in nightmares, of course.

  I see myself there.

  In my corner, curled up near the window. I am thinking: how can I not be? How can I not be “me”? Can I put an end to my existence? Believe me, I wasn’t philosophizing, and these questions were not self-indulgent, but rather expressions of deep pain. A question might occur to you: so why haven’t I killed myself? Who told you I haven’t tried? I did try in the beginning and it wasn’t at all easy. I tried three times and failed. The first time they found me before I had bled enough. One of them screamed and they rushed toward me. The traces of my brush with death are still on my wrist. Then I followed another method, but all I gained from this battle was a poisoning, a chronic stomach ulcer, and two weeks confined to bed. That’s how life (and those who control it) punishes you if you want to leave it and stab it in the back—by sentencing you to more pain. The same pain from which you are trying to break free. Then I convinced myself that killing myself would be an admission that I was defeated and that they had triumphed over me, at least in the last round, and that’s something I would never accept. You might make light of what I’m going to say, but I honestly had a real horror that what would follow my suicide would be the same life I had already lived, in all its details and with all its pains. I would be more miserable in it because I would know everything before it had happened and I wouldn’t be able to change it. I have to be honest—the credit goes to Dr. Salman, the young doctor who showed unusual interest in my case after he was moved to the hospital. He had only just graduated and had started work enthusiastically and with zeal. The misery of life and the bureaucratic routine in a place such as Iraq had not yet crushed his idealism or his dedication. He listened to me seriously and I felt that he believed everything I was saying. Unlike the others, who had become like rusty machines that treated me roughly and inhumanely. It was he who convinced me that suicide would be a defeat, and it was he who encouraged me to write. He told me he couldn’t give me a notebook and a pen. Pens were banned because they might be used to harm oneself or others. But he gave me a small tape recorder with cassette tapes. It was an old machine he had used while at university to record lectures. I was wary and had suspicions that he was in league with them and wanted to spy on me. I didn’t record anything of value at first. I was also worried they might confiscate the tapes later. So all I recorded was some words and symbols to remind me of pointers to the material I was recording in my head. From then on, the embryonic idea of the catalog started to take shape, and he deserves credit for encouraging me.

  I see myself there.

  I’m still standing, clutching the iron bars and resting my forehead on them.

  I put my finger in my mouth and wet it with saliva. Then I take it out to check the direction of the slight breeze. That’s when the wind comes our way. I’m like a sailor getting ready for a long voyage. I wave at the birds that sometimes pass. I clap for no one. In various ways and through various activities I take advantage of the half an arm’s length of freedom made possible by the absence of glass in the windows. They removed the glass because one of the patients in the ward broke the window with his fist and used a piece of it as his passport to oblivion. But this freedom, which allows me to put my arm out and clap my hands outside the ward, comes at an exorbitant price on winter nights when the cold sneaks in and claps in our bones. The extra blanket they give us in winter isn’t enough. Everyone misses the windows when a violent sandstorm blows up, covering everything and all of us with a thick layer of sand. Despite the bother of having to clean the place up the next day and despite the taste of the dust, the sight of the sky that day was extraordinary, at least for me. I stood watching it for more than an hour.

  The strange thing about that place is that its effect on the inmates is usually inversely proportional to the declared objectives. Those who are mad remain mad, and may even get madder. The sane go mad. I don’t believe that the lines between the two states are necessarily clear. The lines that some people think are clear do in fact have overlaps, zigzags, and areas of ambiguity. There are islands, regions, and pockets where madness asserts sovereignty and raises its banners, although they lie in the realm of reason. The opposite is also true, because there are sane people who have been displaced and driven from their homes into the realms of madness.

  I see myself there.

  In my head I was going over what Beckett wrote, repeating in silence: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” but it is different. Godot doesn’t come, of course. But things start coming to me by themselves and addressing me. Yes, things don’t happen, but they speak. And my uncle used to come and visit me. To tell the truth, he never stopped visiting me. He might stay away for two or three months, but he would visit me. He didn’t say much, except for the usual questions about how I was and his constant assertion that my condition was improving and that he was trying to mediate to get me out as soon as the doctors would allow it. Things spoke more than my uncle, more than everyone. Except for Dr. Salman perhaps. And my Turkoman friend Safaa. Yes, he was the only person who was relatively close to me. Safaa cried bitterly when he said goodbye to me. He studied engineering at the University of Technology and graduated with honors, and then completed a master’s degree. He then managed a factory that his family owned. But he had a breakdown and they put him in here, or rather in there (I wonder whether there’s a part of me that’s still there!). I’ve often thought about the terms break down and a nervous breakdown, and the question kept bothering me: “Can someone who has had a breakdown revert to how they were before? Sane and healthy?” I don’t know. I often imagined myself as a building that has collapsed and is trying to rebuild itself, stone by stone, wall by wall, floor by floor. It’s trying to restore its structure and all the details as far as possible. You have to imagine the time and effort that all this requires. You have to persuade those who were living in the building that they can move back in to bring it back to life and keep it alive. Yes, there were people living in me and some of them will never come back, of course, because they died when it collapsed. Many people will abandon you after you collapse. Ah, I like this image. I’m an abandoned person that is inhabited at the same time. Inhabited by things and spirits. But how many collapses can the building take anyway? Then, after hours thinking about this metaphor, I realized that the difference between the building and the rubble lies in the way the stones and the other materials are arranged—in other words, in the form. The content is the same in the building and in the rubble. The text is written in two ways.

  I see myself there.

  When I tire of watching the scene from the inside (a small ward with four beds), I rest my forehead on the iron bars and watch the scene outside. A piece of wasteland except for a eucalyptus tree in the distance. It stands alone near the perimeter wall, as though it’s waiting for a visit from another tree that has promised to come back but is running late, or as though it’s waiting to go back to its family. A few yards to the right of it there are piles of sand and bricks. To the left there are some rusty steel bars of the kind used in reinforced concrete. The space between the window and the eucalyptus tree is overgrown, with patches of grass here and there. Beyond the wall and the eucalypt
us tree stretches the sky, crisscrossed sometimes by small birds that rest on the branches of the tree or land on the steel bars. When there’s a fair number of them I can hear them twittering. My heart beats and its wings flap, without flying off and without me flying. I ask myself: who clipped my wings? The scene, as you can see, needed something more, so sometimes I used my own stock of images to add what was missing: a butterfly, for example. And I trained myself to listen to the tree first, and I succeeded. The tree says everything. After that I listened to the birds, and between the two of them I can hear everything. The scene is permeated by an additional logic that isn’t apparent.

  She told me her mother wanted to meet me and asked whether I had any objection to our visiting together at the weekend and having dinner with her. I agreed enthusiastically. She clapped in childish joy, then added with a smile, “Don’t worry, this isn’t a test and it doesn’t necessarily mean that our relationship is now very serious. She just wants to meet my boyfriend.”

  “So you don’t think our relationship is serious?” I said.

  “Of course it’s serious. But too much seriousness ruins everything. We’re still at the beginning,” she replied. I didn’t comment.

  The next Saturday we took the number 2 subway to Brooklyn. Her mother was still living in Crown Heights in the house where Mariah was born and lived until she finished high school and moved to Pennsylvania to go to college. On the way I asked her about the area. She said her childhood there had been generally happy. But she remembered the unrest and violence that lasted for three days in 1991 after a vehicle in a Jewish funeral procession accidentally killed two black children. Protests broke out, many shops were burned down, and the police deployed in large numbers. She was nine at the time. She was frightened and didn’t go to school, staying at home with her mother’s husband, who was then out of work. Her mother has been working as an English teacher in a government school in the area for three decades and will retire in five years. Her father is from Georgia, but he left Mariah’s mother after she was born and she hasn’t heard anything from him. When she was eighteen her mother broke the news to her that the man she had been calling Dad for years was not her father and she told her the name of her real father. She told her that he had abandoned her as soon as he heard she was pregnant and hadn’t left an address or ever contacted her. Mariah felt sad of course, although her stepfather had treated her as if she was his own flesh and blood and she had never felt that he discriminated between her and her half-sister Maya, who was born two years later. For a while she was determined to find her father and meet him face to face. She looked for him and found that he was living in Georgia, where he worked as a minister in a parish church, and she learned that he had found God after a life of frivolity, dissipation, and addiction. He was “born again” and married with three children. Under a family photo that he had posted on the church’s website he had written, “The family is the source of love and the Christian life. Through it we assert our truthfulness and our loyalty in our daily lives.” Mariah wondered whether he felt guilty or, when he wrote that sentence, whether he thought about the daughter he had left in his girlfriend’s womb when he abandoned them. She bought a plane ticket to Atlanta and decided to go and listen to one of his sermons in his church and to go up to him afterward and tell him she was his daughter. Her mother didn’t object, saying she understood her desire to meet her father and be in touch with him. But Mariah decided against going, since meeting him wouldn’t change much and might complicate things. She might be able to forgive him for abandoning her mother because he was afraid of responsibility, and maybe he had been going through a difficult stage in life, but she would not forgive him for his silence all those years, especially after he settled down and found God! She wrote him a long letter saying everything but she never sent it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “There’s no need to feel sorry,” she said. “As far as my relationship with my father is concerned, I reached a stable emotional state years ago, or rather I don’t have a relationship with him. I’m not sad and I won’t be sad. No, that’s not true. I do feel sad once or twice a year.”

  In the first weeks, after she told me about her problems with her father and how the relationship had been cut off, I asked her about her childhood. Her answers were brief and vague and I guessed that she would open up later when she felt more comfortable. I teased her, saying, “Does the fact that you’re telling me these details mean that our relationship is now more serious?” She punched me and said, “Enough. Are you going to punish me all week for what I said about being serious?”

  Her mother’s husband worked as a railroad engineer with Amtrak. He didn’t spend all week at home because he worked on the New York–New Orleans line and spent the night in New Orleans before coming back.

  I asked her what family name her mother used so that I could address her the way she liked, and she said, “The same name as I use, Dawson. I decided to take her family name and she didn’t take her husband’s family name.”

  We came out of the station and walked for some minutes. Then she pointed at one of the houses in a line of three-story brownstone buildings. “That’s it,” Mariah said. In front of each house there were stone steps leading up to the front door.

  Her mother’s apartment was on the second floor. Her mother opened the door wearing a blue dress and a white apron around her waist. She hugged Mariah warmly and kissed her, then shook my hand. She was in her early fifties, though she looked ten years younger. She had large dark eyes, a thin nose, short hair, and a warm smile.

  I was struck by some pictures on the wall in the hallway. There was a black-and-white photograph of Nina Simone. “Mom really loves her songs,” said Mariah. There was another one of a black woman with Martin Luther King. I didn’t know who she was so I asked them. “That’s Mahalia Jackson,” Mariah’s mother said. “The best gospel singer.” Then there were some family photos showing Mariah and her sister in various stages of childhood and adolescence, a picture of Mariah holding her graduation certificate from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied history, and one of Maya graduating from high school. “Maya’s studying at Brown University now,” Mariah’s mother said proudly. Then, pointing to a picture of her and her husband in wedding attire, she added, “Marvin, my husband, should have been here but he’s late back from New Orleans.”

  We moved on to the living room and she started asking me about my family and how we came to the States, and about my relatives in Iraq and how they were doing. I told her I had come in 1993 and that most of my relatives had left Iraq in recent years. “I’m sorry to hear it. The war is a crime. I didn’t vote for Bush or his racist father before him.” I smiled but didn’t say anything.

  She asked me to sit on her left and Mariah sat on her right, facing me. The fourth chair remained empty. When we were seated her mother gave Mariah and me a hand each, closed her eyes and said, “Let us thank the Lord for this blessing, and for the love that unites us. Amen. Please, help yourself.” The plates were neatly arranged—a small plate for salad on top of a larger plate, with a white napkin to the left. Mariah’s mother had worked as a waitress for some time before finishing her university education and starting to teach. “We’ll start with turnip and spinach salad, then fried okra, and then fried chicken Southern style. Did you bring your appetite with you, Nameer?” she said.