* * *
The triumph of it all is the vanquishing of imagination.
There can be nothing new. No new music is imaginable, no new genre, no new memories to repackage and sell, no new stories or ideas or possibilities, no new happinesses. There is only nostalgia and kitsch and superheroes and heartbreak and a sealed fate and surrender. There is no reality other than this one and no past that wasn’t marching toward it. They call it progress. It is undeniable, they tell us, it is all-conquering, it is this and it is now. The world is made. Countries are developed and others are not and so it shall be. A system is in place of such dominion there can be no imagining another. A system underpinned by a global network of trip wires, each tensed and primed to trigger self-destruction before evolution. Look around you. There is no other world. There can be no other way. Surrender. There is only the now. Whisper it to your children at night. It would be better for them to accept it.
* * *
I sit invisible on the subway.
I can’t stop myself from hearing the conversations around me.
“I’m pretty ambidextrous racially and can travel okay.”
“I was just in India. It’s disgusting, trash everywhere, but they were happy, you know?”
“Their religion probably allows them to be happy.”
“We don’t have that here.”
“No.”
“I was with my friend Sarah, though, and they’re obsessed with blond hair and blue eyes.”
“I know. I had a friend she wanted to go to the Middle East to get involved in politics and shit and I was like, yo, look: they will never respect you.”
“No, never.”
Sometimes I think I will throw up from all the words. Every idiot syllable spasms through my stomach and the only way to be clean of this language will be to vomit all over the ground between us.
* * *
I keep thinking of the hospital waiting room. How many hours did we sit next to each other outside in that corridor of disease, so alone in each other’s company? How many hours did I pass wanting to reach those few inches to my left and take your hand in mine? I kept my hand close to yours, close enough for you to feel it, I was sure, waiting for second after infinite second to see if you would lift your finger to make that first curl around mine. Could you feel the questions and doubts pulsing from my brain to my fingers and leaping and falling into the synaptic gulf between us? Would you have pushed me away if I’d reached out? Gently squeezed my hand and dropped it? Is that when we broke ourselves? It seems crazy, now, not to have reached over. It seems so crazy that now, in this instant, I would do anything to be back there and live it again and take the plunge and open that new road, begin that new universe that surely would have been born with the touch of those two fingers. It could have all been so different. We could have all been so much less lonely.
We could have, could have, could have.
* * *
I’m standing on the boardwalk, waiting. Half waiting for someone to say something to me, or try to sell me something, or mutter something under their breath in a language they assume I don’t understand. No one speaks to me. No one gives a shit about you here.
There’s an outdoor bar. The barman opens a bottle and starts pouring it into a plastic cup and for a moment there’s that reflex, that twinge, that plastic-cup twinge, that plastic cup that says to me drink whatever you like, drink yourself into the grave, please, but we don’t trust you not to bottle someone after two beers or smash it and cut open a major pulsing vein of yours and lie there slowly bleeding out under the boards between the cigarette butts and the fallen toys of the children standing aghast in a semicircle around your convulsing body-offering to Murphy’s Law, the twinge that reminds you you’re strapped in with the nanny state and baby can’t be trusted with the glass bottle, you’re just supposed to drink the opiate inside, that twinge that tells you you’re back home in the rat race and you’ve taken a wrong turn and you need to turn back and follow the sign that says fucking Freedom like the rest of the shirtless brotinis on the filthy beach whose only legacy is an ocean full of Solo cups, is the sea, now and forever, pushing their garbage up to the sand, begging for it to be taken away, begging with each wave for someone to, please, just take it away. How can we ever be any different? You have a peaceful revolution to topple a dictator but to have a peaceful transition you need elections and the only people with the resources and networks to win the elections are ex-dictators and dictators-in-waiting. We’re trapped in an Escher painting. We had the fucking numbers. Seven million people voted for the revolution. If the vote hadn’t been split between Aboul Fotouh and Hamdeen, if they’d put their pride aside for five fucking minutes, things would have been different. And now where do we go? Where are we supposed to go in this world where the only things that move freely are the floating refuse of fictional credit, where do we go when every inch of earth is already owned and valued and soon to be bought by Monsanto, when every cent spent holds another human in bondage before being smelted down to a bullet casing? What can we do with information or facts when the only currency that counts is guns and lies, when all anyone wants are guns and lies? Will we go on chattering forever in our digital echo chambers as Facebook throws up algorithmic borders around us uncrossable as the Berlin Wall, irresistibly invisible as gravity, corralling us into digital polities of irrelevant impotence that we occasionally emerge from, blinking, to discover the physical world of violence seething all around us? What use are our words when a republic of belief can be dissolved by a technician in California? Did we escape the mousetrap for those few months? Was there a moment when we were truly in charge of our own destinies or was it all a cinematic illusion? How do you win? How do you ever win? Without guns and Apaches and ranks of fighters and airwaves. How can any of us ever win? The world has taken centuries to build. You think an idea is enough on its own? No, you need a plan and you need patience and you need to meet their violence with your own. You can overwhelm them with numbers or you can kill them with precision. One unit, maybe that’s all it would have taken. Get into Maspero, take it over and broadcast the new voice of the revolution. Two hours. In the end that’s all you have. Two hours between the police retreating and the army taking up positions. Two hours and it was already lost. The right buildings have to burn. The right buildings have to be taken. Next time, you have to be ready to strike unhesitating. And will we be? Are we training, planning, preparing or will we go on forever only reacting? It was lost from the start, lost from the moment we didn’t take Maspero, lost with the Molotov held back from the second army truck, lost when the square emptied after Mubarak fell. Next time you have to be ready. Next time? Next time we’ll see the real revolution. Next time we’ll see ISIS and we’ll see organization and precision and the end of patience. The real flood is going to come. That real rain we’re always being promised.
I put my headphones in to drown myself out:
People get ready
There’s a rain coming
There’ll be no saving
So don’t beg your Lord
* * *
It’s better at night. The streets are quiet. I like to walk. It keeps the thoughts still. Walking is just about the next step. Flee from men and thou shalt live.
I walk for hours. I’ll walk all the avenues. I’ll walk all the avenues and something will change. Manhattan’s great brickwork thicket crowds the sky. Jazz. The future. New York, New York. Isn’t that right, Ned? Here we are. Maybe you were right. The heartache is a cliché.
Did we lose when we stopped selling ourselves? Was there a point in our tiredness and moral superiority and inexperience when we stopped trying? You can never stop. I remember a huge canvas in the Smithsonian: Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada. The Edenic vista of the American frontier, an ice-blue lake, a noble stag, a mountaintop celestial in the distance. A great and wild and infinitely conquerable land. A fantasy for sale. A painting by a German of an imaginary lake crowned by an Alpine pe
ak on sale in Rome along with everything the New World can offer to the battered longings of the Old. America never stopped selling itself, never stopped needing new bodies to crush into the dream’s cement. And if America can’t stop, then who are we to?
* * *
A parked car’s bass line vibrates through the cheap walls of this clapboard building, trucks’ engines roar with a bellowing fury, early-morning arguments between drunks and the chemically confused loop louder and louder. Individual punctures of my anonymous solitude, alien and uninvited. I’m hungry and walk down to the slice shop too early to be respectable. I pay the dollar and sit down and above me is a poster, its colors faded, a smiling white nineties family grinning rigid. Behind them the great golden sunrise of the Dome of the Rock, before them the words Visit Israel. There’s a whole collection of them. Future artifacts of an unsustainable paradox. Smiling family in the Dead Sea, smiling family in a Roman amphitheater, smiling family looking out at the Mediterranean. I walk out without eating.
A coil of razor wire twists over an overgrown lot. I hear the birds and I see the metal and I reach up to touch the edge and I am back outside Maspero, the army’s steel sharp against me, and I pull my finger down and you feel it first, the warmth slipping down your hand, before you see the red darkness against your skin and I’m standing with Hafez, our hands gripping the razored coils, watching the soldiers, alert to their twitching fingers resting on their triggers. “What are you all doing?” a voice shouts. “Who are you defending? Mubarak? Are you with Mubarak!? You’ll side with Mubarak against the Egyptian nation!?” Another voice shouts at the nervous soldiers. “Huh? Do you even know what you’re doing here?” The soldiers aren’t moving. The crowd isn’t rushing them. Nothing is changing. We slipped into the crowd streaming into Tahrir. A group of girls’ head scarves made an island of bright colors in front of us. Behind, boys pushed the crowd faster with their chants and drumbeats. All around were parents with their children, little children on their fathers’ shoulders with the Egyptian tricolor painted on their foreheads or clutching on flags.
“You sleeping here or at home tonight?”
“I’ll sleep in Tahrir tonight,” Hafez said. “Two in, one out. You?”
“I need a night in my own bed.”
“Good. No sense in burning out. This will go on for a long time.”
“They say Mubarak flies to Germany once a year for a full blood transplant.”
“So you’re saying he’s going to live forever?”
“I’m saying it’s a possibility.”
“God damn you, massive leaps in medical science.” Hafez raised his fist to the skies. “Damn you all to hell.”
He still makes me laugh.
“Sorry about this, brother,” one of the security volunteers said as he patted me down.
“Not at all,” I say. “Thank you for doing it.”
And then we were in, and Tahrir opened up limitless before us, a sea of people and possibility and unknowable disappointments all brilliant in the late-afternoon sun.
Not at all, thank you for doing it.
I wipe the blood on my jeans. Pointless memories.
* * *
The next war has begun.
At least 121 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its Operation Protective Edge three days ago in what is shaping up to be a major offensive with 25 children among the dead already. Sherine Tadros reports for Sky News …
I sit alone through the night on the Greyhound.
I sit on the couch next to my father. We watch the killing together. We watch without words. There are only names now. In the night the same dream comes, the Ibrahimi Mosque, the death all around; the bullet holes are breathing, sighing, and I’m touching one, pressing my hand on it, and it is not cool to the touch but warm and I can’t stop the bleeding. The doctor, as always, is next to me and everything is illuminated as a cloud of white fire spreads across the sky. There are more than can ever be named and you shall name them. All the names, from all the wars, all the names we carry with us, all the names on all the lists that keep on growing. Mohamed crouching, crying behind his helpless father. Aya breathing her last breaths alone with a sniper’s bullet lodged in her neck. Munadel falling face-first into the asphalt of a settler road. Hamza playing football one moment and burning to death in sudden agony the next. Muhammed, gutshot, counting the minutes of his own slow death. Iman, whose heart slowly failed and died locked in Gaza. Haneen, Ali, Husam, Anwar, Mustafa and Islam and Khaled and Essam and Toussi more and more and more than can ever be named but you must hold them in your head and keep their faces next to you at night and hold and hold to give them some sliver, not of justice but at least of memorial. You’ll join her soon. Will we be together next? Will I find a name for you? Will you take off the gas mask? Will I see your face? Will you hold my hand? Will your hand be cold? I am coming. It will happen. We will be together soon. There are more than can ever be named and you shall name them.
* * *
I will go back to New York. I can’t stay here.
“You need some new clothes,” my father says.
I tell him I’m fine.
“Come on. Look at those shoes. Let’s get you a pair of shoes.”
We both stare for a moment at my battered Nikes.
“I don’t need shoes.”
“I know. But I’d like to get you some.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
* * *
“Did you see the news?” The early dawning light is still blue. I close my eyes again. Diane is sitting up in bed, her phone in her hand. “They’re going to release Mubarak.”
I roll over, away from her. “Good.”
* * *
I am sitting in the Brooklyn Public Library. What little money I had is nearly finished. Prospect Park waits silent outside. The newspapers are full of a new name today: Michael Brown. They left your body out on the street, lying there on the hot summer asphalt for the world to see, for your family to see for four eternal hours. Another city burns tonight. Behind me, a man is whispering down into his chest, a running argument between the two halves of himself.
“Something’s going on, yeah, I know, you don’t have to tell me twice. Something’s goin’ on and Jones Jones is gonna find out what it is. Something goin’ on in my house?! You need to—you need to—shut it up. You’re in a library. Have some respect. I’m gonna find out. Obama? Obama? Obama’s a fucking Muslim. We don’t know shit, I know that much. I know you need something so you’re weak. A man’s gotta stand on his own two feet. I see the news. I see what’s coming. This country’s falling to pieces. Obama opening our borders. Syrians! Thousands! Did you get the milk? The milk? Shut up. Of course I got the milk. Jones was raised right. In the European mode.”
I try to concentrate on the book open in front of me. A blue horse sits in front of me. If only this could be the end. Strong lines, bold colors combining in elegance and grace to give you a horse. A deer, cradled perfectly by unnaturally harmonious triangles of green. The monastery of the title, nowhere to be seen. Flee from men and thou shalt live. The man behind me keeps talking, there will be no resolution to his argument. Another man, his clothes dusty from his labors, is asleep, his bag serving as his pillow. They are together, the two deer, looking out for each other, in a world where the danger is still far away. A woman in a wheelchair is copying out the dictionary word by word. A deer looks over its shoulder, a mother nuzzles its fawn. No death. No hate. A blue horse rubs up gently against its companion. It is perfect, this world in this simple book. Is it strange to want to be a blue horse? To long to be a blue horse? To be loved with simplicity by other blue horses? To be frozen in your moment of definition, to never outgrow it, never fail it.
I cross the street to the park. I walk south. I cut off the main path and into the wilder, lonelier parts, find a bench to sit on in silence. Is it better to find meaning in endless struggle or struggle endlessly with meaning? It’s quiet here. Down where the gath
ering dark is punctuated by the glow of the fireflies in silent conversation.
Was this, then, our full potential? What our new world of digital possibility amounted to? Nothing more than birds rising from the trees at dawn, a mass movement of synchronized unpredictability, a moment of stunning collective action followed by survival instinct. We were a flock of quelea birds, beautiful to behold from afar, impossible to organize from within, all moving forward in a pattern determined by a force we cannot comprehend, by principles forged over millennia of evolution and generations of psychology, each choice in concert with the tiny adjustments of thousands of other birds, each decision steered by the unsteerable flock, each pulling all others toward a fate unforged.
* * *
My phone rings with an unknown number. My phone never rings. A dozen terrible scenarios play out in my mind.
“Khalil.” It’s Mariam. My heart freezes. “Listen, Khalil, I wanted to call you before you see it on the news … They arrested Rania and Rosa last night. Took them from their apartment. They’re going to try them on spreading false information and, and, endangering national security and—what else—organizing a protest … They’re okay. I think Rosa fought or struggled or something but the lawyers say she’s okay.”
The City Always Wins Page 22
