The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

Where And in what unknown depths his bones wander Seabirds alone can tell. —Glaukos of Nikopolis, “Epitaph for Erasippus”

Writing simplifies life, you said, forces coherence on discordant narratives, unless it doesn’t, and most of the time it doesn’t, because really, how can one make sense of the senseless? One puts a story in a linear order, posits cause and effect, and then thinks one has arrived. Writing one’s story narcotizes it. Literature today is an opiate.

Memory is a wound, you said. And some things are released only by the act of writing. Unless I go in with my scalpel and suction to excavate, to clean, to bring into light, that wound festers, and the gangrene of decay will eat me alive.

And whatever you do, you said, don’t fucking call it A Lebanese Lesbian in Lesbos, just don’t.

You said California suited you better than the East Coast because you couldn’t bear the idea of the sun being reborn out of the sea every morning. Apollo’s chariot needed to plummet at the end of the day. The sun must drop into the water, drowning and dying for our eyes.

You wanted people’s stories, not them. You cared for the tale, not the teller.

In the essay, you wondered what kind of person would think it was a good idea to donate thousands of sequins to Syrian refugees who had nothing left, whose entire lives had been extirpated. Bright, shiny, gaudy, useless sequins? A fabulous one, of course, a lovely, most wonderful human being.

I bet you wouldn’t have disagreed. In one of your gloomy essays you wrote, “What is life if not a habituation to loss?”

She had lost too much, she had a hole in her heart, and grief had rushed in like a high tide to fill it. In time, her grief withdrew. She now had nothing except for the hole.

Fate could not be capricious. There must have been a point. He had done something wrong and had to pay for it with a miserable life. His great loss must have some significance. As Francine says, “Insanity is the insistence on meaning.”

“The reason not all young men are rapists is that we distract them,” Rasheed said. “Sports, football.” He nodded his head toward the soccer game below us. “Superhero movies, the internet, porn, and so much more. Unless we keep these boys entertained and preoccupied, they’ll keep our world in turmoil for the next half century.” “That’s an overgeneralization,” Mazen said, “and completely unfair.” “Maybe,” Rasheed said, “but look at them. Look.”

“Why is it that you live in such a safe place yet consider the world so dangerous?” “I’m an American.”