Koolaids (25 page)

I never wrote that play. I did not know how. I sat for days, trying to figure how to put words on paper, but to no avail.

…

The music comes back again. Voluptuous. The violins sing. A siren's song. The dark is all enveloping. The time is near.

…

March 19th, 1996

Dear Diary,

I am unable to stop feeling guilty. Mark tells me it is normal. Bless him, he has been so helpful. I still am unable to stop these bad feelings. I feel I have been a bad mother.

What mother would wish her son dead? I wished Samir dead. I kept hoping it would be all over. I tried to suppress those feelings during his last month. They kept popping up. I could not control them.

I sometimes rationalize it by saying he was dying anyway. There was no hope. He was suffering and I prayed for his death to end his suffering. In reality, I wished for his death to end my suffering. I wanted to come back to Beirut. I hate to admit it, and I pray for God's forgiveness, but he became an inconvenience. I wished it was over.

Mark says that is quite common. Even he felt that at times. But he was my son. I loved him so much. I know Mark loved him, but it is not the same thing. I just pray Samir never realized what I was thinking at the end.

I am weak. I have always been weak. What can I say? I hope he can forgive me.

…

The city was not completely divided yet when my cousin Neyla drove back from her job in a bank on the East side to her house on the West. There was heavy traffic. They must have installed a new checkpoint.

As her car got closer to the bottleneck, she saw the militiamen. She was terrified. As she got even closer, she realized this would be her last day. It was a scene from the Apocalypse. The militiamen would look at the ID card. They would then either let the car pass or ask it to park at the side. When the car was parked, more armed men would ask the passengers to get out of the car. They would ask them to move next to a dead pile. They would then shoot them, adding to the dead pile, men, women, and children. A couple of militiamen would then drive the cars to a parking lot, clearing space for new cars. But the pile kept growing. The victims followed orders.

The fear you experience when you are about to face a violent death is indescribable. You shake, uncontrollably. You sweat, profusely. You lose control of motor coordination. Your bowels fail you. You either are unable to speak or blabber continuously.

Neyla was the next car coming up. The car in front of her passed. It was her turn. The militiaman asked for her ID when she heard a young man's voice say, “Let her pass. She used to be my neighbor.” Georges smiled at her and waved her through. She was weeping uncontrollably when she heard Georges tell another boy, “Her sister was the best fuck.”

…

“Let there be light!” said God, and there was light!

“Let there be blood!” says man, and there's a sea!

Hail Lord Byron, an honest bisexual.

…

When the Israelis entered the mountains, they encountered the least resistance. It was not because the Druze were not fierce fighters. The Israelis simply sent in their own Druze contingents first. There were a few Druze battalions in the Israeli army. The part of Lebanon which had rarely been conquered through the ages was like a cakewalk for the invading Israeli Army. The two staunch defenders of the mountains, the Maronites and the Druze, were not fighting. The Maronites were the Israeli allies and the Druze could not fire on relatives from across the border.

Mrs. Talhouk lived in a house, on the edge of Ain Unoub, a small Druze town. Her house had miraculously escaped any damage throughout the war. When the Israelis were outside her village, they sent warning that they were going to bomb, because they knew
terrorists
were hiding in the village. They advised the villagers if their house had no
terrorists,
they should raise a visible white flag on top of the house. They would try not to shell whiteflagged houses. Mrs. Talhouk took out all her white bed sheets and towels, and hung them on the laundry lines on her roof. Every fifteen minutes she would run up to the roof, like a hysterical woman, and shake the sheets, hoping they would be seen by the Israelis. It became an obsession.

Mrs. Talhouk's house survived the Israeli invasion. It did not survive
New Jersey.
When the Israelis withdrew, the massacres between the Druze and Maronites, which became known as the War of the Mountain, began. The Druze seemed to be winning, when the Americans got involved in the war, openly. They used the
New Jersey
battleship's sixteen-inch guns to bomb Druze villages. All it took was one sixteen-inch shell to destroy her home. It was a two-hundred-year-old house.

America entered the Lebanese Civil War. It paid the price. Two hundred marines were killed by one Shiite. Reagan pulled the troops and avoided discussing Lebanon. Lebanon, like AIDS, was hardly ever mentioned by our president.

…

Borges said things lost their detail when people forgot them. A stone threshold lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and faded from sight on his death. Occasionally, a few birds have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

Calvino said a book does not exist if it is not read.

Sandra Bernhard said without you, she's nothing.

So kiss my ass, motherfuckers. Yippy kay yay.

…

I would like to show you an editorial from the
Jerusalem Post.
It explains the current political situation in Lebanon fairly well.

Lebanon First

Editorial

(August 13, 1996)—Syria's rejection of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's proposal to resume peace talks based on the concept of “Lebanon first” should lay to rest any illusions in the West about President Hafez Assad's desire for peace with Israel. By rejecting such an eminently reasonable and sensible overture, the Syrian dictator has demonstrated once again that he is in no particular rush to come to terms.

Netanyahu's proposal is that Israel and Syria should resume talks in the U.S. in an effort to build trust and inspire mutual confidence between the two sides. The prime minister stated that Israel would he prepared to withdraw its troops from the security zone in southern Lebanon if three conditions are met: the disarming of Hizhallah, the deployment of the Lebanese army to the international border with Israel, and the granting of guarantees concerning the protection of Israel's Christian allies in southern Lebanon.

As the prime minister noted in his address, the situation in Lebanon is truly Kafkaesque. Netanyahu stated, “Here is a situation where the Israeli prime minister announces that he wants to withdraw from the territory of an Arab state–Lebanon. But the Syrian government, together with the Lebanese, are opposing this withdrawal.”

Indeed, one cannot help but wonder whether Syria, its rhetoric notwithstanding, is truly interested in an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The presence of Israeli forces in Lebanon provides the Assad regime with a rallying cry, and enables Syria to justify the presence of its own occupation army, which controls two-thirds of Lebanese soil.

Were Israel to withdraw, international pressure would almost certainly mount on Syria to pull back its forces as well, something that Assad, who views Lebanon as part and parcel of Greater Syria, is not particularly inclined to do. Leaving Lebanon would also require Syria to give up on the profitable opium and hashish industry that it oversees and cultivates in the Beka'a Valley, which has proven to be an important source of revenue for senior Syrian officials.

Netanyahu's proposal should also help remove doubts about his diplomatic skills. Less than two months into his administration, Netanyahu has shrewdly succeeded in maneuvering the Syrian leader firmly into a corner, forcing the latter to come across as the rejectionist in the eyes of the world. This is no small achievement, given Assad's reputation for being a clever and calculating political operator. By placing the ball squarely in Assad's court, and outfoxing him in the process, Netanyahu has demonstrated not only that he is interested in peace, but that he can also play the game of international diplomacy with the best of them.

Personally, I loved the word
Kafkaesque.
I am not sure the situation in Lebanon is truly Kafkaesque. I don't think Kafka could have possibly thought of a scenario like Lebanon, with the Israelis and Syrians.

I also loved that Netanyahu can play the game of international diplomacy. Now I can sleep better at night.

…

I was sitting, smoking a pipe by the fire, when Updike asked me, “What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?”

“You said a mouthful, John,” I replied. “How else would we become adults?”

John nodded approvingly. We had these conversations often, Updike and I. I provided him with an invaluable service.

…

I wanted to write a book once. It was to be a biography of Jean Genet as he died of AIDS complications. There were many biographies of him, so I never began the book.

I decided to write a roman à clef. It was to be the story of Ronald Reagan as he grew up in Lebanon. It was more a love story than a biography. Ronald meets Nancy Davis, a third-rate Lebanese actress who has been in a few Egyptian television series. They fall in love. She tells him to kill a few of his rivals while they are praying in church. He does and is elected president of Lebanon during its years of turmoil. I finished the first chapter of the book, but I could not go on because I was unable to find the published research.

I decided to write a meta-fiction book. I would have to write a book that included every quotation from page 244 till page 328 of
The International Thesaurus of Quotations.
The quotations do not have to appear in order. The only requirement is every quotation appears at least once as part of the story. I never started that book since I became more interested in writing a short story as an interview with Oscar Wilde, where he would have to answer all my questions with each of his famous quotes.

I saw a Website which listed the winners of the worst-­analogies-ever-written-in-a-high-school-essay contest. I decided to write a novelette that included every one of the analogies listed. They were inspiring. I thought the novelette would be magnificent. I listed the analogies for inspiration:

He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

She caught your eye like one of those pointy hook latches that used to dangle from screen doors and would fly up whenever you banged the door open again.

The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

McBride fell twelve stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty Bag filled with vegetable soup.

From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in another city and
Jeopardy
comes on at 7
p.m
. instead of 7:30.

Her hair glistened in the rain like nose hair after a sneeze.

Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.

He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

Her date was pleasant enough, but she knew that if her life was a movie, this guy would be buried in the credits as something like “Second Tall Man.”

Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36
p.m
. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19
p.m
. at a speed of 35 mph.

The politician was gone but unnoticed, like the period after the Dr. on a Dr Pepper can.

They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

The thunder was ominous-sounding, much like the sound of a thin sheet of metal being shaken backstage during the storm scene in a play.

His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

But my thoughts had no Cling Free, either. I wasn't able to write the novelette.

I adjusted my thinking. I would write a book of short stories. I had collected a series of headlines that have appeared in respectable newspapers. I would write a story with each headline as the title. “Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers” could be an interesting story. That was in the
Los Angeles Times.
I also thought “Lung Cancer in Women Mushrooms” might make a good Calvino. “Astronaut Takes Blame for Gas in Spacecraft” had infinite possibilities.

I never got past “Include Your Children When Baking Cookies.” It was a fun story, but didn't lead anywhere.

I wanted to write a book of strange prose, but life beat me to it.

…

Verdi's
Requiem
overpowers the room. Pavarotti and Ramey are having a testosterone duel. My dick is bigger than yours. No, my dick is bigger. Jesus, Jesus, you're number one.

The lights are dim. A cool summer night in San Francisco. A light breeze flows through the windows. Trumpets blow through my soul. It's a full moon. Pavarotti wins. Ramey has a deeper voice, bigger balls. Pavarotti is more confident, bigger dick.

I have a thing for church music. I wonder why. Beethoven's
Missa Solemnis
is the most beautiful music I have ever heard. Rossini's
Petite Messe Solennelle
is divine. My favorite masses are not usually considered the spiritual ones. Still, they do talk to the divine. Maybe I yearn for something. The mezzo-soprano sings. Beautiful voice.