The Hospital

by Ahmed Bouanani

  “Nowhere.”

  I resigned myself to waiting for the rest of the story. After a few minutes, during which I thought that Rover had dozed off, he continued. “Do you remember the big iron gate that you walked through the day you arrived?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you seen it since?”

  “Uh . . .” (I felt a sort of emptiness in the pit of my stomach).

  “Have you tried to find it again?”

  And there it was. The dream was subtly sliding into the sinkhole of my nightmares, and for a fraction of a second I heard Guzzler laughing: “Hey, Smart-Ass has lost his marbles!” I stood up abruptly. “What’s all this about anyway? What’s your point?” Rover stood up as well and, his eyes locked on mine, said: “Just this: I’ve been looking for that damn gate for years so I can get the hell out of here but I have yet to find it again!”

  something gave way in the monotony of the days — or else in me, I don’t know anymore — and yet nothing appears to have changed, everything continues, same as that first day, to the rhythm of a clock out of time, calling out the seconds, weeks, months, with ceaseless diligence. After living on top of one another, confined within four walls, acquiring practically the same movements, the same behaviors, the men are now all the same age; their laughter rings clear, with disarming nonchalance, their gazes settle indifferently on a wild flower in bloom for twenty-four hours, a dead rat, an autumn crocus, a falcon that’s escaped from a fairytale, or a season apart from all the known seasons. Nothing surprises them. Childhood and old age burn in their eyes in a single bonfire. As for their memories — they’re not much different than a dog’s. When I went back to my bed at dawn, leaving Rover in the park, alone, in the middle of his absurd nightmare. I didn’t turn around. I slipped under my clammy sheets, my heart racing, and slept like a log. I remember a time when I abandoned a friend in the same way, on a deserted street, under the wan glow of a street lamp, without turning around to see if he had left or if he was watching me leave; I slipped under my blankets in the small bed of a cruel child, slept for thirty years, and when I woke up, I went outside, convinced I’d find my friend under the same streetlamp. He was my only friend, but I no longer remember his name or his facial features or the sound of his voice. I don’t even remember why we were friends. I’ve told myself hundreds of times that he’s surely dead by now, dead like everyone else I abandoned in the limbo of the past to run away, alone, toward the future. Well shit. All this forward movement, across tomorrows, kilometers, weariness, hope, sadness, celebrations, to end up in a future surrounded by high walls! One day, I learned that my friend was alive, that he was my age — that you’re still alive and that you’re my age. You chose to live like a troglodyte. I heard that you shut yourself up in your bedroom, in the dark, and haven’t moved since, like a plant or a mineral. Behind your curtains, death chases the reckless and foolhardy, marking them, and you, crouching, hear children outside playing with a ball, you hear them aging . . . I can’t imagine you surrounded by dreams, by ghosts, completely rigid, resolute, gulping in great breaths of sweet madness. But what do I know? Nothing could be more ordinary than learning about the death of someone’s father, that a bad driver ran him over like a greenfly or that he was shot with a 7.65mm bullet in the back of the neck or in the gut, that he’ll no longer walk in the front door, that he’ll no longer kiss you on the cheek while he hands you cash to go to the movies. And so what? He’s dead, goddammit! What would you have me do, slash my wrists, kill somebody, set fire to something, damn it all to hell, just because your dad breathed his last? You understand that death, anyone’s death, doesn’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things, right? Good. You hole up in your little shack, grow your hair and fingernails like an idiot hermit who worships eels and sacred fish, you gorge yourself in the shadows, you crap in a chamber pot, you breathe in the stubborn stench of your own shit, you make pets of your lice, bed bugs, crabs, the rats and cockroaches procreating under your bed, and what is it that you want to prove to the world? The world doesn’t care, but your mother does. She tells you: “You need to get married, son!” You growl like a puppy, and demand some hot tea and cigarettes. Since I wasn’t brave enough to visit you in your rat hole — you can’t visit the past with impunity, you leave your blood and sweat behind, you leave it all behind, and it’s rare to emerge from a mass grave in one piece — I imagined you in a scene from a movie, in black and white. All that I can make out in the darkness are your cracked walls, your rotting ceiling, your faceless head marinating like a rock lobster; I sit on the mat in front of you, I say hello, you say nothing, I ask you how you are, you say nothing, I could have chanted the sixty verses of the Quran and you would have said nothing, well, no luck, I stand up, and here I am at the hospital, almost happy, light as an empty page. Now, leave me alone, okay? What’s the point? The only way to get rid of your ugly face is to go vomit. Keep my photo as hostage. I’m off, and this time I’m really leaving, goodbye friend, goodbye Casablanca, goodbye my blue sky, my flowering streams, goodbye all my bullshit.

  Strange as it may be, my faint resolve to endure begins to melt in the acid of boredom. I feel the break like a dying man abruptly woken, disappointed, trembling, in tears, who’s just been told he will lead a diseased, short-lived existence, condemned to a phony immortality, the oblivious and pitiful fate of the premature fetus and the moth, the trajectory of the shooting star, the perpetual battle of the caltrop. From now on, I’ll get drunk, blacked-out, I’ll quietly take my barbiturate every day, I won’t pull on my leash, my breed being poodles and cowards, I’ll kindly take care of my childhood paraplegia (I promise!) and loyally and patiently like my brother the camel — with no hard feelings — willingly like the donkey and mule of fables, adorned in a mantle of baseness and devotion, I’ll recite the prayer book of the Hemiptera at every sunrise, I’ll respect (I swear!) the slightest comma and even the haphazard punctuation of flyspecks.

  light the color of incurable sadness filters through the room’s broken windowpanes. I sit at Rover’s bedside. I can barely hear him breathing, his head’s under the pillow.

  “You asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re answering me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get up.”

  “No.”

  “It’s sunny outside.”

  “Here too.”

  “Under the pillow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  “Why?”

  “Let’s go see our friends.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  Rover removes his pillow, irritated. He leans against the wall. He doesn’t look at me. He’s so stubborn that not even the threat of death could make him yield. He extends the palm of his hand toward me, holding a crumpled plant.

  “What is it?”

  “Basil. It’s the plant of the Prophet and sailors, it’s an eye open to the future, the farmer’s crystal ball. I had to walk in the park for a long time before I found some. Smell how good it is, like the blood of springtime, right? You just need to plant it in a little bit of dirt and water it, a few drops will keep it alive for a human eternity. I’m entrusting it to you, take care of it like it’s your own flesh and blood. As long as it doesn’t wither, I’ll live, and if one day its green petals fade, well then . . .”

  “Well then I’ll know not to count you among the living — my tears will flow until I’m very, very old! Are you done babbling, grandma?”

  “I’m not asking you to believe me, just to obey me!” says Rover stubbornly.

  “Why would I obey you?”

  “You have to.”

  “Says who?”

  “Try to fight yourself. Win or lose, you’ll never know peace. I can see it in your eyes. Even if you want to convince yourself that you’re a unique specimen, you don’t believe it any
more than the rest of the nobodies do . . .”

  “What? Are you crazy, do you have bees buzzing around your brain, do you wash your hair once a year because you think you’re the king of Persia?”

  Smiling, Rover gets out of bed. He hands me the basil leaves and says: “Just take them and let’s go have fun with the other madmen.”

  “did you fall on your head or something?”

  “I’m not talking to you, half-pint. We understand each other, right Guzzler? A December without red wine is like Eid el Kebir without lamb. We all have to pitch in, boys!”

  At the end of every year, the privilege of preparing and organizing the hospital festivities falls to Fartface. Nobody can say who exactly charged him with this task. But Fartface gets so energized by the process, exploding like a jack-in-the-box as he hands out roles and choreographs dance numbers, arranges jokes and sketches, that nobody would dream of challenging him for the responsibility, much less of trying to take over a single crumb of it. In any case, Fartface assumes command of operations in the first week of December. As soon as Rover and I arrive in his room, he pauses and, in his military voice, says: “Ah! I was just about to summon the two of you. Smart-Ass, you’re my secretary and advisor, you’re going to help me write my speech, it has to be good enough to make the most corrupt member of the Académie Française green with envy — you know, the guy who’s used to plagiarizing old texts or hiring unemployed university ghostwriters. As for this clown . . .”

  “Don’t count on me!” says Rover in a calm tone.

  “We don’t discuss orders. Especially today! I’m running out of time. Yesterday, a naive angel told me . . .”

  “Again?!” exclaims Guzzler. “If you keep contacting them, you’ll get them all sick.”

  “It’d be funny to hear them coughing up in the clouds,” O.K. chimes in.

  “Shut the fuck up you morons, you pimply protozoa! This is really serious, fellows, I swear. ‘He’ promised to intervene on my behalf, so I need to prepare my funeral sermon!”

  Everyone heckles him. Rover makes to leave the room.

  Fartface grabs him. “Don’t move, I’m not done with you yet, sweetheart.”

  “Back off, you old fool!”

  Rover frees himself from Fartface’s grip and quickly walks out. Fartface, speechless, turns gray. It’s probably an effect of the ambient light.

  “What’s gotten into him?”

  Fartface looks around. His gaze rests on me.

  “What’s gotten into him, huh?! This is the first time he’s called me an old fool in that tone. Can you tell me what’s wrong with him? Well, can you? The kid’s never gotten angry before, he doesn’t even know what it means!”

  Fartface sinks into his bed, watching the group bicker. “You can’t learn anything from hanging out with riffraff. From morning to night, it’s nothing but brawls, insults, and profanities — a grand old time in short!” O.K. loudly declares, “I’m going to piss!” before leaving the room. “Monsieur is going to go pee, that’s worth knowing, and what’s more he announces it like someone saying ‘I’m going to the U.N.’ Hey, Guzzler, can’t make the effort to talk correctly, huh, vary your vocabulary a little? Oh Lord, we must’ve arrived late when You dished out the assets to humanity! And the day when nothing was left but shares of politeness, courtesy, and kindness, well, we all must have been out sick!”

  Seeing O.K. return, Guzzler sits up straight and cries out: “Son of a bitch! You didn’t even go to the bathroom!”

  O.K. lifts up one leg: “Warning!” And he noisily lets one rip.

  Fartface sighs, concerned: “Old fool, me . . .”

  I look at him without saying a word. Suddenly everyone becomes serious. Guzzler, O.K., and the others stand up and form two lines. In the silence, Guzzler gestures to Fartface, inviting him to lead the “prayer.” Cheerfulness restored, Fartface announces: “The imam’s out of commission, make do without him, boys!”

  Straight away Guzzler trumpets: “Dear Lord, Master of the seven planets and the seven heavens, have pity on our loyal corpses, send us a woman!”

  “Allah, Allah!” chants the group.

  “Just one adult woman will do!”

  “Allah, Allah!”

  “Even if she’s obese, one-eyed, or has ringworm!”

  “Allah, Allah!”

  “Let’s not get carried away,” murmurs O.K.

  “Silence in the ranks! Let’s pray brothers, let’s all pray, our popularity is on a radical decline in the slums of paradise! We, the begetters of chaos, we the brothel-born children of discontentment and complaint, we the eaters of ryegrass, nettles, stink bugs, and wind, we the eternally satisfied, dying, burping, blessing, giving thanks, may the seven saints pull some strings for us the day the scores are settled to get us the supreme aperitif! Sidi bel Abbas es-Sebti, Sidi ben Sliman, Sidi Abd el-Aziz, Sidi el-Ghezouani!”

  “Et cetera, et cetera!”

  “And Sidna Souliman ben Daoud who splashes in the seven waves of the Apocalypse, and Laqraâ Bensensens, and Sidi Zeblaz the virile!”

  “Et cetera, et cetera!”

  “And Sidi Bouâtoutou and Sidi Kaouki and Sidi Wassay and Lalla Rahma and our two-horned friend Alexander, and Cheddad Bnou Ad and Napoleon Bonaparte, and all the layabouts, the overindulgers, the narcs, the degenerates, the slave drivers, the pukers, the pen pushers, the masturbators, and in alphabetical order, those present, Bou-Rass the ambidextrous, Chewing Gum, Fli-Fla, Nesma, Windshield Wiper, and the rest of us, masterpieces made of foreskins and prostates, let’s humbly bow down, to the ground, noses in perfumed shit, and say . . .”

  “Amen, amen!”

  the second-to-last night falls hard, my head’s eating away at me, scattering me to the four winds. I cross over into a section of infinity, surrounded on all sides by pending files, moldy paperwork, and shelves overflowing with x-rays of lungs. Rover is eying me, speaking words that I can’t hear, one of us is breathing from inside a jar, no doubt about it, now he’s yelling in French, in English, what are you saying? New York, Mexico City, popcorn, hamburger-frites, what are you talking about? Slow down, for fuck’s sake, can’t you see we’re almost to Paris? Last stop, everybody off! “Argan’s dying.” Speak clearly, dammit! All I can hear are waves breaking, and somewhere there’s a damn door slamming, slamming, slam! What time is it? Leave me alone, go rot in your sleep, there’s people around at night, huh? What do they want from me? I haven’t finished my chapter on Fartface yet . . . “Argan’s going to die . . .” he thinks he’s the Emperor of China, what does he expect, that I’m going to go on and on about his whole life story? What did you say? Since birth he’s been wiping his ass with newspapers, as good a way as any to educate yourself! What did you say? “Argan . . .” Shit and shit, I’m thrust into the cold, my dream leaves at a gallop, and Rover’s still here, shaking my rib cage, okay, okay, I’m here, what is it?

  “Argan’s going to die.”

  “What?”

  “He’s breathing in and out like a leaky bladder, he’s not going to hang on much longer.”

  “If this is a joke . . .”

  “Come on, he’s in his bed, he’s been throwing up rivers of blood nonstop, he’s going to take the big leap soon and no wall is gonna hold him back.”

  Argan looks at us with startled eyes, he clenches his fists, forces out a smile — he’s sweating profusely. Fartface puts a hand on his face, comforting him: “Hang in there, you’re not going to desert us now, are you?” He talks to him about Christmas presents, paper lanterns, cakes, and candies. “I can’t see you guys anymore.” Argan sits up like an injured animal: “I’m seeing funny!” I can’t take it anymore, I walk away from the group, I’m shivering, it’s as cold as the North Pole. Guzzler is sitting outside on a step, he tries to pull himself together, hiccups loudly, sniffs, swats at the air around him, telling Rover to “let it go,” but Rover persis
ts, insists: “You yourself said that none of us will ever get better, remember, or are all your memories locked away, too?”

  “Leave me alone!” sobs Guzzler.

  I intervene: “Leave him alone!”

  “Get lost, Smart-Ass, go finish your shitty chapter.”

  Guzzler lifts his head, two moons reflected in his damp eyes: “You too, Rover, get lost, my friend is dying, and you’re telling me I should leave. Go, go, go, but go where, goddammit?”

  “Someplace where the sun is up, where hope isn’t dead, where there are flowers!”

  “You know where you can put your hope, and your flowers on top of it?”

  Rover does a kick, stumbles. “Bastard.” He fidgets. “All you dirtbags are finished, you’re beyond fucked!” He stumbles again in the dark, spits out some insults, moves under the trees; he laughs and laughs and keeps laughing until I can’t make him out any longer. Then I hear Guzzler, moaning as he stands up — he wipes his eyes, the two moons are fixed on me. “You could have gone with him, you’re the one who believes all that bullshit!” He turns around and enters the room in Wing A where death roams. I’m alone and I’m cold.

  fartface, thirty or fifty years old, with a shaky memory, a vagrant wanted by the police of Heaven, arrested two or three times, convicted and released for lack of evidence; Guzzler, eighteen years old, notorious repeat offender; O.K., twenty-five years old, anti-Islamic intellectual; Argan, sixteen years old, dead at dawn because he believes, like all the dead, that dawn is the beginning of something; Rover, how can you pin an age on that face? — reported missing, for good this time. He also chose dawn to leave, but to where? — that’s the real question. North, south, east, west, the forest with its trees of dubious genealogy, its silent rivers draining dirty bandages, red and yellow cotton balls, and empty vials, and a miserable sun like a drop of light in our miserable lives. I’d like to imagine him one more time, for you, for me, picture that damn, tireless jokester who, I hope, lost his way for once and for all. Like an annoying fly, a dog that’s too loyal, he keeps coming to the rescue, I see him advancing, and the more he advances the more the night widens and multiplies, the more the trees grow disproportionately around his small chromosomal frame while, in all directions, the past, the present, and the future, blind and dumb meteors fight their way through the leaves. He’s wearing an old backpack filled with pride, misdeeds, clowns laughing or sobbing in their melodramas, phony love stories, and mirrors, filthy surfaces reflecting tangled alleyways, forking, fading, or petering out in the mud. There are no sidewalks, sewage drains, or electricity; my old roads run alongside wheezing, humid houses that are governed by the generous laws of the heavenly stick, of the father lost amid the warmth of women, and by the no less generous laws of God’s blessed poverty, trickling out, through his merciful will, redemption by credit or cash or receivable over a thousand years of fasting. The brave jokester leaves, with my hagiographic sky haunted by disparate ancestral hordes stinking of mothballs, henna, and urine, penises and swords drawn, prancing on their horses into swamps of glory, and interminable and pathetic vanities. Now he’s disappeared completely around a bend in the path; he’ll continue to march toward a charitable sunrise, hoping to finally find some old-fashioned hospitality on his route, caravans of tribes tirelessly fleeing to protect the manuscripts of the Maghreb. I know he’ll continue to walk, at each sunrise he’ll be twenty years old, with a cargo of memories that he’ll scatter along forbidden roads, in vain, because the cornered and scattered human race to which he belongs unlearns, on every day offered by its god, the game of living memories, the eagle’s flight into a dazzling sky replaced by the falcon’s terrible and blind descent. Now, he’s disappeared completely, carrying a large part of me along with him. The little that’s left of my atrophied, sick body makes do with its new solitude, surrounded by my sad characters in a celebration laden with pitfalls, joyful as an interrupted laugh. I don’t know by what coincidence I find myself in the large television room, among dark coats, heads squeezed into towels or bare, escaped from a Brueghelian delirium; a strange serenity comes over me, it makes me think that a new edition of the bastards’ resurrection is possible, that it’s not only possible but horribly ordinary since it’s governed by the inhumane law that everything perpetually repeat itself. The only difference is the much wanted fluctuating and ghostly margin between an imposed reality and a dream, a dream of seductive cruelty desired by the unhappy soul seeking release amid unnatural horrors. I stay seated within this margin, under a pallid light. At my side are the evening’s four volunteers, dressed up as women: Guzzler, with his blond wig, looks like a ceiling broom; O.K., who’s outrageously made up thanks to a burnt wine cork and scarlet lipstick, is playing the prostitute on her way home; the other two, Chewing-Gum and Windshield Wiper, mouths pursed, bicker like two true gossips, delighted to have spotted a shadow in the neighbor’s window. The antics are gathering steam. Once they’ve gotten rid of a burly fellow obsessed with the idea of marriage, the four women have to contend with the advances of one guy that looks like a beanpole and another chubby-cheeked kid. The game would have gone on endlessly, in utter frenzy, if Fartface hadn’t gotten up behind the makeshift podium. His low voice forces the dying racket to retreat. He begins to talk in a monotone voice, completely deadpan, like someone who’s learned an old text by heart and is in a hurry to get to the climax. After a while, something unbelievable takes place. Reality is being distorted, it’s impossible to explain with mere words. As Fartface drones on to the audience, prompting laughter interspersed with noisy coughs, another Fartface, more physically present and more intimate, is talking to me, directly, and not the slightest word of this private monologue is noticed by anyone else in the room. It’s only later that I truly become aware of this strange anomaly. In the moment, I listen attentively and receptively, like a well-behaved child receiving fatherly advice, without the slightest bit of surprise, so perfectly still and relaxed that you might take me for an eccentric used to seeing people splitting in half since the beginning of time, forewarned that astonishment and shock would be inappropriate reactions.