The Wrong End of the Telescope

by Rabih Alameddine

The entire airport seemed to be on a coffee break. Time felt lethargic.

Levantine nonverbal communication would appear psychic to the uninitiated eye, a brow furrowing or a slide of a lip was worth a thousand pictures, and that was before one included the hands.

of his face, along with lips—the delicate full lips of a gourmet. Everything about him was round.

Every idiot thinks they’re a writer; they’re not. Every dullard thinks they have a tale to tell; they don’t. But I should. I have a good one.

I should write to make sense of my world, to grasp my story. 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.

You are large, like Whitman. You contain multitudes.

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.

Even then, she had those eyes that could see both angels and demons. I thought, here was a woman who found everything surprising and nothing shocking. Of course I fell. She was what I wanted to be and what I wanted.

her thumb and forefinger placed the fruit on my tongue, and it exploded in my mouth, not with taste, mind you, but with possibility.

The air flowed around me like cold ink, seemed to settle on my body.

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.

Lesbos was a sleepy island. Nikolaos joked that their supply of things to happen had run out when Sappho was laid to rest. Things that happened happened elsewhere. But when the Syrian refugees first arrived, the entire village, the whole island, mobilized to help. No islander would ever leave another human being at the mercy of capricious waves, no matter who they were. That was the law of the sea.

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

And Pallas Athena’s wise owl flapped her wings in my brain. I finally understood, stupid me.

Whatever his faults, and they were plentiful, she loved him in both a godly and an ungodly manner, for he used to look at her as if she’d arrived on a scallop shell, the smell of sea on her hair. She was his holy spirit. Their neuroses were perfectly complementary; their insanities fit together like a jigsaw. The odd piece was mine, not theirs.

At times, like Orpheus, I felt I could sing to life itself, to defeat the reaper if only for a little while, but I also had to watch in despair as Eurydice was dragged back into the underworld.

We were able to do incredible things every now and then, but often we were helpless. We were godlike in the sense that we were both omnipotent and impotent, and like god, often all we could do was watch and witness.

She exemplified the word “fabulous.” She used to gesture dramatically with her hands while talking. I used to think that I didn’t need to hear her words because her hands explained everything, that those hands of hers were the last practitioners of a lost Babylonian language. Then her gestures matured, became grander, with more flourish, more panache. They no longer illustrated her narrative, were more about style than a need to be understood. I would get lost trying to reinterpret them.

Everything in the apartment had a function: to make her appear striking.

what did their club do? Well, it was formed only that morning, so their objectives were not entirely clear yet, but the main reason for the club’s existence was mischief making, as in his mother told him to take his friends and make trouble for other people not her, if he knew what was best for him, and of course he knew.

Cars and vans were parked bumper-to-bumper on both sides of the narrow road. The Iraqi girl took my hand in hers. I thought she was following the universal edict of hand-holding when crossing the street, but then one of the boys grabbed my other hand. They were escorting me across, guides safariing me through this frightening savannah, making sure I wouldn’t be attacked by a feral car.

across the road was a large police van, its motor idling, its color a blue so gloomy as to be almost black. I couldn’t look at anything else for a minute. It was a beacon of dark in the light, a big blob of bad color.

You wrote about the early troubles you faced as an immigrant, being called all kinds of names during the Iran hostage crisis by classmates at that most liberal of institutions, UCLA. You tried to explain that you were neither an Iranian nor a Muslim, but how could you convince anyone while speaking with a distinct accent? You were unable to pronounce Eye-ranian the way they did.

You stuck out like a mole on clear skin—a beauty mark, darling, a beauty mark.

noise-canceling headphones blasting Christa Ludwig singing Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder into your soul. What breaks us is rarely what we expect.

Europe may have once been a sanctuary but no longer. Europe was like the light of a star that kept going long after the star itself had died.

transitioned in college; I changed from a depressed person to an angry one.

Anger was the shape of my breath, outrage the sound of my voice. I cultivated indignation like a hothouse orchid.

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.

With lipstick and stilettos, you could face this harsh world. When Francine saw an old picture of you in heels high enough to make any mortal dizzy, she asked how you could bear it. You said that for her, heels were oppression, but for you, they were liberation.

literature validated your feelings as a young man, how reading Gide and Genet made you feel less alone. The poetry of Abu Nuwas healed you. You wrote that when you were a teenager in Lebanon, a teacher mentioned in passing that many of Shakespeare’s love sonnets were written for another man and in that instant your life, your soul, unfurled like a morning glory at the sight of dawn.

My coiled ears tuned in to the slightest turn of breath, my eyes recorded the most minute flutter of muscle. I was discovering that one of the best ingredients for great sex is curiosity. I wanted to discover her. All these years later, I can still feel the imprint of her body upon mine.

coming out, even to oneself, to a kundalini awakening.

saw wisdom and pain, much pain. Scratch a cyst of anger and the pus of pain will ooze out.

Mina reached out, her hand touched mine, her fingers tapped the dorsal side of my hand, as if she were riffling piano keys in a slow, sultry melody.

I dreamt of Tiresias while on Lesbos,

Tiresias, a prophet of Apollo, came across two copulating snakes while walking and hit them with a stick, wounding them, and kapow, Hera transformed him into a woman for displeasing her. The great goddess made him in her image as punishment and ended up with a devout priestess. Seven years later, now a married woman who had borne children, Tiresias returned to the scene of the crime. She encountered the same snakes copulating, appreciated the miracle, and Hera turned her back into a man.

Hagar, concubine of Abraham and mother of Ishmael, was the first emigrant, that the Arabic word for emigration was likely derived from her name.

Daedalus, the artist, had built the infamous labyrinth for his king, Minos. In this impossible maze, the king imprisoned the Minotaur, a monster that had the body of a man, the head and tail of a bull, and happened to be his stepson in a way, the offspring of a salacious assignation between his wife, Pasiphaë, and a hefty bull.

The hotel was in deep hibernation. The pool looked dour without its water. The few chairs left outside looked miserable without their cushions; a few clung to each other, entwined, hugging and cuddling until spring.

Iron is iron until it is rust.

Like him, I began with only one sentence, the incipit of all further conversation. In the middle of a white sheet I wrote, “I have never stopped missing you.”

he was quite all right or would be as soon as he went outside for a moment to inhale some fresh air and expunge the negative energy.

how Sumaiya was to go to a hospital when she looked grotesque. How indeed?

I loathe these Westerners who have fucked us over and over for years and then sit back and wonder aloud why we can’t be reasonable and behave like they do with their noses up in the air as if they’re smelling shit. I hate their adulation of their own imaginary virtues. She actually said they don’t love their daughters with an upper-class English accent. May Satan tie her forked tongue for eternity.

“From your lips to God’s ears,” Mazen and I said at the same time, even though we both were blatant nonbelievers.

I felt nervous, if not outright afraid, when I had to tell patients and their loved ones that there was no hope. I’d done it numerous times, of course, part of the job, but I had yet to be inured to it and never improved at it, whereas Francine had the ability to be intimate with grief and the grieving, to hold wounded souls in her hands.

Asma had understood how badly her mother was doing all on her own, but the younger two knew only that their mother was ill. They were waiting for her to get better. Everything got better, everything always turned out all right. Wasn’t that what Sumaiya and he told them?

When You Don’t Know What to Say, Have a Cookie