Anti Lebanon. Carl Shuker
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faced the TV, Pascal and Etienne were lying on the floor. Etienne said, “He’s a madman,” as Leon took the hit, and then, “We have mirrored displays. . . . You were snoring, habibi. . . .”
Zakarian sat alone on the single armchair beside him and Leon passed him the joint. Zakarian seemed strange now, too tall, Herman Munsterish, foreign amongst his friends in this room. Directed by Frank Capra, the caption read, over bats pouring from a cathedral. Black and white flickered over the faces of his friends and this stranger and they seemed to move with the images on the TV.
“I need a drink,” he said huskily, and Etienne lifted an Almaza from the floor and pushed it to him across the coffee table without looking. He drank deep and Emmanuelle smiled and past her Lauren stared hard at the TV as if to scold him. In the dim and changeable light on the poster the little dog leered and in the room behind it he saw green eyes now, and how the mirror was divided into vertical panels too, over that room. So there were several layers to this picture, a print of a painting of a mirror within which nested three or more realities.
The film changed, a close-up of a face, a baseball game, unsubtitled, a man barking out at them, total absurdity as they all calmly watched and even as he felt this he felt the mediocrity of it, the stupid film, the garish music, the calm watchers of a barking American man and then a frenzied crowd of black-and-white Americans from 1940-something while a kilometer away in the border neighborhoods a part-time guerrilla with an AK-47 poured fire from a corner and a poor Sunni woman separated from her son crouched behind a retaining wall and slapped her thigh with her hand again and again in a muscle spasm of panic and horror at the sound, and screamed at her little boy to stay down.
He rolled over sideways in the corner of the couch, listened, a fight starting onscreen between two baseball teams and then everyone joining in, and Emmanuelle’s hip was touching his. The hash’s effects rolled sluggishly in, his eyes swelled, he squinted up at the poster.
“Leon doesn’t like old movies,” someone said. And then the music went soft.
Boy, I could sure use a drink, said a voice in English.
Looks like the same suckers get married every day. The soft laughter of the watchers came late, by a few seconds. They didn’t speak English as well as he.
What’s he hiding from?
Two by two, they come they go, hip-hip hi-yay!
Elaine Harper.
Mortimer Brewster.
Speak up, sonny, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
I want to keep this undercover.
Love her? Of course you love her, you’re gonna marry her, ain’t ya? More soft laughter seconds after.
No, you don’t understand. I don’t want this to get out for a while. I’m Mortimer Brewster.
You’re who?
Mortimer. . . !
Laughter, clatter. Some things happened, he lost concentration over the loud braying voice.
Yes, Mortimer, a girl whispered sadly. No, Mortimer, a girl whispered sadly. The music changed, he opened his eyes slightly. On the screen read: From here in you’re on your own, and there was a toll of a bell and a shot of a cemetery.
Leon looked up at the poster, and then he got up and walked out onto the balcony. The soft orange of the streetlights lit the high apartments opposite to an anti-twilight that was cast over a two-story portrait of the Christ hung from frayed ropes. Above that the Jtaoui hill fell away to a scree, a spangled dust of lights from the coast to the crests of the Mountain all along the Jounieh bay and to Byblos. He smoked and watched. A taste of salt and exhaust. There was a constellation of lights moving on the sea—a U.S. or Israeli warship out there; the USS Cole someone had said. It was very quiet, and then a few, far-off, near-comical pops of gunfire that seemed to come from east of the city as they echoed off the hills. He felt clear, empty, strong. He felt warm. It was strange because he felt, for perhaps the first time since he quit his degree, almost violent: viscid, lucid. The door opened behind him, gently closed again. He stared into the eyes of the icon.
“I know it’s bad,” Lauren said without looking at him. She moved up to the balcony rail beside him. He smiled, confused, and grunted. “Just one cigarette?” she said and then grinned up at him. “I know I’m bad.”
“Oh.” He gave her the cigarette and lit it for her and she didn’t inhale deeply enough; a little crescent glowed and died. He lit it again. She exhaled and looked at the smoke, not the view.
“Is Hind asleep now?” Leon said.
“Finally, I think so. She was just lying in there singing to herself. She doesn’t understand but then she will say strange things. She will ask Georges questions that don’t make sense. ‘Why don’t we die?’ she asked him tonight. And, ‘What is under the floor?’”
“They’re good questions.”
They smoked. Then after a few minutes Etienne came outside too, and Lauren’s brief softening changed. Something had been going on before Leon had arrived, some argument, some tension in them all beyond the obvious. Things like this usually brought them together, brought up the gentle, the quiet, the kind. But Etienne lit his cigarette and walked to the end of the balcony and leaned around to see the next apartment, then he strode back behind them, and looked down over the street.
“It’s just dead,” he muttered savagely.
“You should see Phalange HQ,” Leon said. “Lots of blacked-out RVs moving very purposefully. Very far from dead.”
“Doesn’t it . . . doesn’t it anger you? You don’t get angry?” He stared at Leon, bloodshot-eyed, then, purse-mouthed, with a contemptuous pah, blew smoke over the neighborhood. “This . . . ? This?” He waved his cigarette at the silent and empty streets.
Pascal and Georges and Emmanuelle came out too then, the film abandoned, and it seemed like everyone was smoking tonight.
There was a sort of silence, then Georges said, “In Tripoli a funeral was fired upon. Three killed.”
“Oh no,” Emmanuelle said softly.
“So you’re going up to the house in the Mountain?” Lauren said to Pascal, and everyone listened.
Pascal’s uncle and aunt had a holiday house up in Mzaar, and, though they were Aounists, as Leon’s father and sister, but as none of them were here, Pascal was going. It was a complicated and loaded thing. Hiding from the Hezbollah in the holiday house of Christians who, since Aoun propagated and signed the Memorandum of Understanding, in effect supported them. Pascal looked sort of blank, and there was a silence. Then he said, “Yes, we’re just going up there for a day or two. They’re family. Just until things calm down. Until they elect a president.”
“A year or two then?” said Etienne. “A decade?”
“Why will they not let the army get involved?” Emmanuelle said. “Just stop it?”
Lauren scoffed outright, and Etienne laughed. Georges looked down and said, for her benefit, gently, “I hear they are, the Hezb, I mean, quite surgically and carefully taking over Future positions and then handing them over to the army. The government trying to control them is what has set this off.”
“You’ve heard about these students getting attacked with sticks and chains at the LU buildings?” said Etienne.
Leon said, “That’s just a total provocation and it should be ignored.”
Georges said, “This is the beginning of Hezb ultimately making the complete transition from armed resistance to traditional political party proper.”
Zakarian emerged from the living room to join the smoking crowd, an Almaza in his hand.
Etienne