The Angel of History (9 page)

I saw a man open a book on the bus, the title was Middle Easterny, maybe
Jihad in the Desert
or
Terrorist in Our Midst,
something exciting, because the cover was the color of what we imagine blood to be, a lush vermilion, which is a lush word that rolls off the tongue exotically, verr-mill-yon. The mass-market paperback had endured many readers, a thumbing too many, it was falling apart just like the first book I was given to learn reading and writing back in Cairo. I was too young, my aunties kept insisting, too young to read, quite a few of them including my mother couldn’t even write their names, but I wanted to, I wanted to desperately.

There was a girl in the house, maybe four or five years older, I was supposed to call her sister, but she didn’t care for me, not that she abused me like the kids later on, she didn’t hate me, just did not care and did not wish to engage.
She faced life, and me, silently. I can’t remember her uttering a word, and I can’t remember her name now, she was the daughter of an auntie from Morocco’s southern city of Agadir, I envied her so much. She attended school, left the house six mornings every week, covered her body with a beige dress, the school uniform. I would have loved to wear that beige dress and become a schoolgirl like my not-sister. She returned through the kitchen door in the afternoon—everyone who lived in the house came and went through the kitchen door, the clients used the front—and placed her book bag on the long table. I would be sitting at the table, enraptured. Yes, Doc, that was the inspiration for my Halloween costume that year I wore a headscarf with two pink pigtails sprouting out of it. As thick as those pink pigtails were, they were nowhere near as lush as hers. Her hair was difficult to tame, though less so than mine, and her tails looked like the arms of a flocculent mohair sweater. I wanted them so much, wanted to wrap myself in them. She would sit at the table and begin her homework. Even then I knew that I could not have what I longed for, her hair or her dress, so I longed to read like her.

The chair I sat on was much too high, my feet had no chance of touching the uneven stone floor, and the long dark oak table stood high as well. I was always short. I could not stand on the chair because each stone below was hand-carved, no two alike, filled with grooves and indentations that were older than Cairo itself. The reading book may have been over-thumbed but it was weighty, bulky, and unwieldy, so I could not bring it toward me off the table. Auntie Badeea and my mother had to improvise, fixing a wooden coffee tray as a bridge between the table and my
seat. In essence, I learned to read and write on a highchair. I have to say, Doc, that floor lives on for me to this day in the way each of my feet sometimes lands differently on the curbs of San Francisco, where a tree and its roots raise the cement. Years ago, when Lou suffered from peripheral neuropathy and his feet would go numb, he would walk slowly, always looking down at the ground like a pigeon around bread crumbs, to make sure he didn’t stumble and fall. I used to walk that kitchen floor always looking down at the stones, at the atlases of countries and their borders, at the geography of rivers and steppes and great deserts, at the topography of hills and valleys, the flesh of my soles wrapped around each round protrusion, sinking into each shallow crevice. But most of all, I remember that my feet never landed at the exact same angle or faced the same way, no one’s did on that floor, as if each foot had sprouted wings and could travel in any direction it wished.

My right hand covered my ear as I learned to read because that’s what one reciter of the Quran did, he placed his right hand just below the white turban and rocked back and forth as he sang each sura. I did the same as a child, and years and years later, in a smoke-filled café in San Francisco, at my first reading with a dozen or so young poets, all as awful as I was, your earnest and naive pickaninny faggot approached the microphone, and without my thinking about it, my right hand covered my ear, I rocked back and forth, and I blasphemously sang my poem. Both members of the audience thought it was delightful, as did the other poets, my performance was so exotic and quaint. But I was not putting on a show, that was how I learned to read, and to write too.

One day when I was not feeling well—I was a very sickly child as you’d expect—my mother came to sit on the lower left corner of my bed, my left, wishing to have a serious conversation. I was to begin writing to my father, once or twice or thrice a week, I was to send a postcard to him in Beirut. My father would one day finish high school, graduate from college, make something of himself, and he was my father. I was to tell him of my days, what I was learning, what I loved and cared about, to remind him of me, to make him see that I deserved my dreams, that I was worthy.

I know you came to visit me, I know. It wasn’t just Behemoth’s odd behavior, the instant I walked through the door he rushed down the stairs and jumped into my arms from the fifth step, right smack into me, his claws digging into my chest, drawing three dots of blood that bloomed on my work shirt. I carried him upstairs only to find the front hall light off when I was sure I’d left it on, and the light in your room was on, as was the one in the toilet. At first I was confused because why would you want to use the toilet when you’re dead and gone, ghosts don’t need to pee, but then I knew it was you because who else would turn your room light on, who else but you? Also, you ignored the faux Tiffany Mission lamp on the dresser that you probably didn’t recognize, I put it there long after you left. I felt weird, I was supposed to feel violated, someone was in my house, but no, I didn’t, it wasn’t someone, it was you, and this was always your house too, in fact it was
oddly comfortable, you being there was just right. Was there something you had to tell me?

I sat down, terrifically exhausted, couldn’t do anything, not even make dinner, so I went to bed, which was something I never did after work, never that early. I turned off the lights, the lamp next to my bed, another faux Tiffany, and so help me, I felt you lie down beside me. You hugged me, you held me. You thought I didn’t know, didn’t you? I did, I knew it was you. I slept a Rip van Winkle sleep, dreamt of snow on dark waters and lake baptisms, woke up after ten solid hours. I know you’re here. You can come out now. While my mind processed the chaos that passes for thought in the early morning, I had cracked five eggs by the time I realized I was about to make you an omelet as well. Decades may have passed and sometimes it feels like only yesterday that we had our breakfast together. I looked at the one remaining unbroken egg on the counter, a deep brown in its gray carton, I couldn’t move, couldn’t budge, it hit me how alone I’d been, a blow to the solar plexus that almost doubled me over in pain. I’d had a life since you left, I still worked at the same tedious law firm, I made perfunctory friends, on Wednesdays I had lunch with the other four word processors at the firm, I did yoga on Monday and Thursday nights, meditation on Tuesdays, I went to art openings, I hovered in the back of bookshops at poetry readings, I watched bad television shows with soporific gay characters that were supposed to represent me, I was living, I thought I was content, I was told I was happy. I did a marvelous impression of a man not crushed by dread. Once I felt your warm breath on my neck, I was no longer invisible, you saw me, you always saw me.
Me cogitas, ergo sum.

You can come out now. You’re always welcome. This is your house too.

You left an arc of ashes on the floor, why are you still smoking?

You never believed in God, Doc, did you? You said if God created man in His image, why couldn’t man invent a God that was more anthropomorphic, less gratuitously remote, who, like his enemy, Satan, resembled us? But I believed in God, amidst everything that was happening, I believed in His rachitic existence and I prayed to Him. Was that why I was punished, my heart ground in its mortar to coarse powder, as coarse as your ashes, which had remnants of one or two of your teeth, did you know that? You like many before you endowed the Devil with wickedness and perseverance, you made him fun, witty, intelligent, frisky, lively, ironic, and above all, petty, all too human, like us. The hell he suffered seemed a heav’n to you because spending time with God was like after-school detention. But your European Satan wasn’t mine, no, not mine, my Satan was Iblis, a lonely one with mischievous, insanely blue eyes, I knew him, you painted yours with exuberant colors, the life of the party, not mine, my Iblis was there when no one else was, he was my homeboy, always with me, and I believed, I believed in God the absent father and Satan sitting in the corner sulking because he loved God more than anything else and when God told Iblis to bow down before Adam, he refused, To no other but You, Iblis said, I have no way to an other-than-you, I am an abject lover.

After you left, and the apartment finally became empty, became all mine, I used to believe that Satan was outside whenever someone knocked on the door, whenever the ringer ding-donged, I did, I thought he wanted to come in, and worse, that he wouldn’t want to leave, that it wasn’t just a short, friendly visit, he was looking for a place to live or something, so of course I wouldn’t open, who would? When all of you died and the world cared not one whit and church bells in their belfries remained mute, the nice psychiatrist changed my antidepressants and prescribed some other pills to scare my voices away, and they left for a while and when I returned home from the hospital all those years ago I was able to answer when someone knocked. You would think that was a good thing, right, but why, why was opening doors a good thing? If a door closes there’s less draft.

Someone knocked this morning, probably couldn’t bother with looking for the doorbell, four taps on wood, like the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, remember how you thought they were Death knocking and I thought you shouldn’t have told me because after you did I couldn’t hear the symphony without thinking of Death knocking on my door and I couldn’t hear knocking without thinking of the Fifth or the porter scene from
Macbeth
—someone knocked, and drained as I was from the outburst and the jeremiad of the evening before at the restaurant, I descended the stairs clad in my white jellabiya and opened the stupid door. Unfortunately, it wasn’t Satan, no, God wasn’t that merciful—
knock, knock, knock, knock,
who’s there in the name of Beelzebub, here was the epitome of a knock-knock joke, Frosted Tips Something Bernhard, whose eyes were as big and wide as a tarsier’s, non-nocturnal of course since it was
morning already. He looked so scared that my first thought was to hug him and calm him, you know, mother away his fears, and I felt guilty to have been the cause of such obvious pain, I—I was the one who did this to him. He stood there, trembling a bit, as if he were facing an executioner’s unsteady sword. I waited for him to speak and it took a moment for him to utter, I’m sorry about last night. He told me I was one of his heroes, at which point I snorted, a harsh fricative that was uncalled for because, you know, who hasn’t idolized the wrong person, who hasn’t granted superpowers to cripples, and I could see, and feel, Frosted Tips’s soul wilt, as if I had sprinkled salt on an unfortunate slug. He assured me it was true in a simpering low voice, and he couldn’t look at me directly, his once-darting blue eyes fixed on my funny dress, my eyes on his neon shoelaces, but that was not what he was disturbing me for, he went on, he wanted me to know that I’d misunderstood his intentions and that he might have said all the wrong things as was his wont, but he couldn’t sleep last night for thinking that he’d insulted me, which wasn’t his wish and he couldn’t forgive himself if that was the case. The only thing I thought of saying, and I did, was to ask how he knew where I lived, and for the first time he glanced up at me, his eyebrows arched questioningly. We all know where you live, he said, anyone who has read your poem, you wrote your address in a stanza from
My New Sana’a
and no one could understand why you’d put your zip code and even your apartment number in a poem, and I told him because it rhymed. There was no intent to harm, he insisted, and he wished not only to apologize but to tell me about himself so I could understand him better. I had to bite my tongue, his puppy-eyed earnestness disarmed me.
I realized that as much as I wanted him gone, I was lonely. I wanted to connect, I wanted something. He had read in a poem that I took a walk every day and wondered if he could join me, we could chat, and it was spring so we could enjoy the blooming trees, to which he had a guide, a book of San Francisco street trees, he held it up so the top of the book covered the bottom of his face including his mouth, and there was a tree trunk on the cover, which made his frosted hair look like its treetop. I asked whether we would stay in the neighborhood or go farther because the length of the walk determined what shoes I wore. He said he’d return in twenty to give me a chance to change out of my housedress.

You hated my jellabiya and never wanted me to wear it even though it gave you unfettered access to my ass, but no, you preferred my brown butt constricted in tight jeans and I was in America and should dress accordingly, and long before you turned ill, when you still had the hots for me, you forced me to wear nothing but tighty-whities around the apartment, calling me your callipygian Caliban and spanking me every time I walked by. I miss you, Doc. I should tell you, though, that I wasn’t American, we may have thought I was, but it was not so, it never was.

Frosted Tips looked a bit too pleased with himself when I emerged from my cave, he grinned, his hands behind his back, red strap of his man-purse crossing from left shoulder to right hip, a deeper-red felt Borsalino askew atop his head now covering his blond hair. He pointed to our tree, his book claimed it was a laurel tree, he told me.
Laurus nobilis,
I said, we used to call her Daphne, and he asked why that name. He was young and I unforgiving. How could a poet, even a mediocre one, not know Apollo’s Daphne? You used to call
her the stupid tree, for Daphne was an imbecile of a virgin who turned down the god in all his glory. Frosted Tips asked if I had names for other trees in the neighborhood, leaning back as he spoke. He had the sort of expressive face that would make it difficult for him to hide his machinations, evil or otherwise. I knew he was going to ask me a question a few seconds before he did, what did I think of the political situation in the Middle East and did I believe there would be peace in our lifetime? I wanted to smack him, slap his face with every step we took, left slap, right slap, I didn’t, of course, but I must also have an expressive face because he recoiled a bit without my having to do anything. Still, his earnestness was refreshing. I told him I didn’t do Middle East conversations, and furthermore, my remaining life was much shorter than his, so he shouldn’t be using the term
our lifetime.
He proceeded to floor me by saying under his breath, though loud enough for me to hear, Grumpy much? I began to laugh, which must have given him permission to let loose. I was the grumpiest person he’d ever met, probably the worst in history, was there anything I liked, where was I when happy gay genes were being handed out, sulking in some corner probably. What could I say, he made me laugh. I remembered how we used to be, all of us, all our interactions, whenever one of us was nervous, meeting someone new, for example, or having to say something that made us vulnerable, we went camp. When Chris asked Jim to be his boyfriend, he couldn’t say it outright, so Saint Agatha had to come out, I offer you my love and my breasts, darling, if your ass be mine. Remember? Well, Frosted Tips unleashed his inner queen and she was a jungle cat, not tarsier, and fun—anything but nervous. He went on to say that
if I hated gay men so much I should create a new political and sexual identity and call it grumpy. I would want a flag, I told him, it would be gray, he said, I’m thinking gray is too much color, we should go with natural burlap. You need a Grumpy Center, he said, where you can show movies you hate, art exhibits you abhor, and books you can make fun of. He asked if my drag name was Mommie Dearest, and I told him it was Curmudgeka, and he screamed a high C of glee. I had to explain that it wasn’t exactly my name, that it belonged to Irish Greg, that we used to call him that, but I told him that since you were all dead now, I’d taken on your drag names. I’d never said that out loud before. I inherited everything including your names. Frosted Tips and I were now joined together at the eyes. We walked slowly, even more slowly than my usual pace, he asked me what Cairo was like, he told me he was from Toledo, Ohio, the town that gave the world Jamie Farr, you know, the Lebanese. I knew who that was, even though my television-watching skills were undeveloped, the actor who Americanized the name Jameel Farah in order to get better jobs, which was a good move because celebrity or not, you don’t want to live in this country with an Arabic name, you really don’t. You get humiliated at airports, insulted at grocery stores, threatened at gas stations, no, you don’t want an Arabic name. He interrupted to inform me that Curmudgeka was out of her cage again. We should talk about trees, I said, that’s a safe subject. Our conversation was easy, laughter and silence, this tree is a lemon bottlebrush, levity, seriousness, vulnerability, hilarity, and the southern magnolia is quite proud of its posture.