Memento Mori We had known for a little over a year that it was terminal. Every conversation had that noise in the background which we believed Rabab could not hear. Those were difficult conversations on our part and on hers, they were peppered with physical pain as the bone cells were gradually replaced by neoplastic ones, dysfunctional entities, little carnivorous beasts. She changed and was much harder to recognize in the texts. Talk of hating life. The part of the unseen that creeps into circumstances and we have little right to know, little will to prevent the insidious impact on our mannerisms. It is there and like invisible cables in the rafters of the universe, we bob on them like puppets. There are two sides to every story. There are photographs of the dead and the living. Memento Mori. The prop of our own skeletons, the anchor of existence as it drags through the sand of space/time. I could not sleep the first night. I lay in the profound darkness of the cell trying to make out the graffiti on the walls, sketches of women in elegant eighteenth century clothing. A Bengali, an Arab, a few others. Each wall of the cell had one or two drawn by bored amateur artists incarcerated and inclined. Like Adlieh, there were messages inscribed by the past occupants in a variety of languages. Little notes to God and to the future tenants, to us. Samar could not sleep either and noticed me laying in the dark with my eyes wide open. She got up and pulled her mattress closer in. She asked me to roll over and proceeded to give me a massage. She was forever trying to keep her head above water like this, by taking the lead and distancing herself from her fellow inmates. A common trait in a jail. There is something that precipitates this in every person, at least in women, acts of denial distinguished by a variety of hopes and shames. I had no idea of the time, no concept of how much had passed between the meal and the turn-in when the guards walked by outside the heavy metal door and flipped off our only light in the bathroom which resembled a cave just above the cisterns of Beirut waste. I could make out Rasha’s laundry stuffed between the bars hanging to dry, her thongs and tank tops looked like twisted Tibetan prayer flags in the dark. I could see the outside lamp light shining through the water bottles stored in the corner. Hanna and Nana were sound asleep as were the Bengalis. Rasha snored heavily and when she turned over she moved so suddenly the draft from the displacement of the sticky air could be felt as she lugged her healthy thighs and forearms to the right or the left and let out enormous breaths and grunts. I might have been thinking of my own brother somewhere in the federal prison system, in Oklahoma or Al Tuna. His arm scarred from the flesh eating microbes that nearly relieved him of the need to write with his left hand to sign disability papers he’d always hoped for. A small nick from the rocks up in Zacatacas turned into three months of surgeries to relieve the pressure inside the casing of his flesh. I’d not bothered to find him in almost a year after he’d been hauled away, incarcerated instead of choosing drug rehab, his choice. He’d been caught harboring nine illegal aliens in a shed on the property where he camped and worked on building a life for himself out of odds and ends, carpentry skills. He defecated in buckets and sheltered in an old van up there. He’d been a petty thief since childhood, our yard up on Mayer sported the frames from stolen bikes that he’d turned upside down and spray painted. Thoughts returned of the accident and the pole as it appeared in the late afternoon sun on the Beirut autostrat that courses down through several suburbs and into the South near the border of Israel. It was silver and unforgiving, it was death in a handshake. As I perceived the inevitable joining of my car and the pole, I melted as the sun did at the border of the sea and horizon and it felt good. A relief from the steady onslaught of neglect and abuse. My own and that encountered from others caught in the web of ignorance and failure which administers justice in the field outside of our eyesight. As I pulled myself from the wreckage that afternoon more than 200 souls stood in a large group encircling my car. Dumbstruck. A man shouted “benzene!” and pointed frantically to the area near the gas tank. I waved them away, insulted at their invasion of my privacy. Death is such a private moment after all but avoiding it is headline news, it belongs to all. I cannot remember being lifted onto a stretcher but can hear the radio as it played in my car as I tore the old silver necklace from between the steering wheel and the knobs grateful for finding it. I must have fallen to sleep and when I awoke, the sun was already at nine. I looked around the cell expecting another cheese sandwich, a spread of Kiri on flatbread and a cup of tea. Neither was available and Samar offered me a piece of cold chicken and dirty rice from the day before which I again refused. She did not appear offended and offered me a cigarette which I refused. I waited for Rasha to finish and she motioned for me to move away from my mattress where I could see into the toilet where she crouched and was plucking steadily at her mons. Jailhouse etiquette. I moved over to the other side of the room where the others were sitting and sorting through their few belongings for whatever items they needed for the morning and through the window I noticed the guard looking in, his eyes moving over each of us as if counting. He opened the door and pointed at me. It was as if I were deaf and mute, unable to comprehend even the slightest Arabic phrase, “Tah” or “Enti”. I’d succumbed to a state of silent gestures like one who is choking on bread. I looked to Samar and she told me they wanted to take me out of the cell. She encouraged me, certainly it was to speak to the judge or a lawyer. I hurriedly slipped on my shoes, tied back my hair and exited the cell. I was relieved to discover I’d not have to deal with the nuisance of handcuffs, a part of my dignity restored. We walked through the corridor which was well lit by now and they took me into a narrow room not more than the width of an old janitorial closet. Two men were inside with a tripod and computer. There was barely enough room for three chairs, one each for the men there and one for the criminal, for me. One of them asked me my name, demographics while the other steadily entered them into the computer system. I realized that I was being booked. He asked me to open my mouth using hand gestures and swabbed for DNA. I hoped I’d not done anything in the past that my skin would testify against me the way my brother’s had exposed him to a long series of hardships. The men were expressionless and resisted smiling or talking. For them this was ordinary, this was not an incredible phenomenon as it was for me. Information transmitted to Interpol part of their service to the country. I found out later that I will never hold office in the Lebanese Parliament, a small price to pay in reality. Who wants to be slapped or punched by another legislator? Who needs to be bribed to abstain from a vote or drawn in caricature? I wasn’t even a citizen. They motioned for me to go stand at the end of the room and one of them positioned the camera in front of me and took the requisite shots which most likely are still in a database in the basement of the bureaucracy. I looked up to see the guard bringing a younger man into the room, an Iranian. He was clearly innocent of any wrong doing, the look on his face a blend of shock and innocuous disbelief but no doubt, the threat of a US led Syrian invasion prompted the authorities to arrest anyone and everyone that week. He had the same problem as I did only worse, his mute status and none of the Arabic skills I’d learned after I’d lived over a decade in Riyadh resulted in several misspellings and mistakes being made by the man entering data who had to backspace several times and roll his eyes in frustration. They finished by placing each of my fingers and then my hand on the scanner. After a few attempts they got what they needed from me and the guard led me back to the cell where the girls were busy smoking. Samar was not there and Hanna told me she had gone up to see her lawyer. With each trip outside the cell, there was a mixture of hope and resentment in the others left behind. Upon returning there was a palpable sense of relief that the fellow inmate would remain to continue the long conversations there. Hanna had taken up her position by the door, ready to begin her banging or what I discovered was her intense infatuation with a man in the cell down from us named Hadi. It was nearly four days since I’d left the United States. Six since I’d been told that Rabab was in liver failure. Two weeks since I’d been cavorting on the banks of the Smaller Bear river. It was 32 years since I’d seen the lights of the small plane go down outside Douglas taking the life of a registered nurse named Connie. It was 7 years since completing the Quran for the first time, and 9 years since I’d rode in my first ambulance alongside an old woman through the congested streets on old airport road just past the School of Opulence on the eastern side of the Ouzai and 10 since they found a man in the rubble of the Hariri assassination with one hand on his cell and the other pointing, rigor mortis having set in.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 14:09:22 +0000
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