I heard a moan and rattle of the throat, so I looked through the keyhole and saw Ta there, standing with his trousers scrunched up around his knees, his naked bum convulsing. I thought, He’s having an intimate moment, I won’t disturb him, so I took a couple of steps back. But just then I heard my brother’s voice, weak and strangled as though a large hand were covering his mouth. Could Ta be having sex with a girl when my brother is there watching him? I wondered if he’d offered to stay with my brother and watch over him just so it would be possible to make love in secret? Who is this girl he’s hiding from me? Why the need for all these secrets?
The voice got louder, so I bent down again and this time I saw Ta standing to the side, stroking his erect member, putting strawberry cream on it — the kind my brother was so fond of — and showing it off, adorned with sweets, to a person who the keyhole wouldn’t allow me to discern until Ta moved backward and my brother’s distorted, wretched face appeared before me, soiled with a mix of cream and semen.
I don’t know how I got the door open and reached him, faster than an untamed wind, stronger than an earthquake, and started hitting, punching, kicking, and beating him. Until what was underneath me was just a mess of features covered in blood and urine. I didn’t regain consciousness from my waking coma until my brother took my hand and pulled me — us — out of the garage. I didn’t want to go with him, as though I intuited from that moment that I’d lost the right to be outside, anywhere outside. He sat me on the doorstep of our house and, perching down next to me, put his head on my shoulder like he used to when he was sleepy. He cried a little and then fell asleep. When he woke up, it was already evening and my family came, with Ta’s family behind them, bringing the police, who took us away — me to jail, Ta to the cemetery, and my brother to one of those centers they call “special.”
During “my absence,” I learned that my brother had lost his appetite and that he used to ask for me from morning to night, while banging his head on the wall, repeating, “Kaaaaaa.” Even looking at him makes your heart bleed, that’s what my wife told me on one of her visits, after I entrusted her with his care. Whenever he saw her he would get more agitated and angry until the nurses would remove him, restraining his arms and legs and gagging him. Finally, she asked my permission to stop visiting him since every time he expected to see me and not her. My family stopped their visits to him too. But every time I asked about him, they’d all reassure me that he wanted for nothing, that he was in good hands, and that specialists were caring for him. I thought that prison came as a mercy to my parents, since it delivered them of me, because had I remained outside I wouldn’t have let them do this to him and I would have inevitably committed two more crimes without batting an eyelid.
The eye knows that my brother died because of his loss — that he withered and decayed, oppressed and wanting, missing both me and Ta.
What I can’t stand to think about is the certainty that he was — despite all that happened to him for so many years — still attached to Ta and loved him, unable to feel hatred or malice. When I think about that, it ignites remorse and defeat in me. I feel a burning fire inside myself, spreading through every inch of my insides, not leaving a trace on what originally were destruction and ruins.
Years have passed since this incident and the end of my sentence, which elapsed after five years since they determined mine was a “crime of passion,” as the lawyer told me. As though it was somehow dictated by my passion. My passion for whom? My passion for my brother? My passion for Ta? Or my passion for our small family, made up of the three of us, motivated by the fact that our families were busy and not looking after us. This led to a desire within us to find that missing care by providing it to others. So I didn’t search for an explanation for what happened, though it was the image of myself, scattered around like a doll whose limbs had been torn off, organs removed, and features smashed — that’s what worried me. That’s how my bodily functions and senses were all disrupted — my heart died, my intestines were squashed, my liver ripped out, and all that was left was an eye.
I am Mr. Kaaaa and I am nothing.
I sit down on the earth beneath the tree of melancholy, the lone tree, the last tree, my back against its trunk, my legs and feet sunken deeply into the grass and dirt. The plain lays out flat in front of me on a gentle slope, empty of anything that might hinder the coming of the wind. Not a pebble. Not a wisp of straw. Not a stick of wood. Leaves rustle above me and I know that I am about to expel my last breath. The eye looks up to the sky. A single cloud is passing by. A small cloud that doesn’t disturb the tyranny of the sun. I hear a crackle of laughter moving among the branches, a gentle breeze drops fresh buds on my face and head. I hear it prancing about frivolously, whispering before looking over on me from within the lacy leaves with two small eyes and a half-open mouth full of saliva. The eye trembles, delighted, quivering, tearing up, and fluttering before opening its mouth, filled with a voice tumbling down on the plain, touching the grass.
“Khaaa...”
Then a blink. And a dot. And disconnect...
Originally written in Arabic.
Eternity and the Hourglass
by Hyam Yared
Trabaud Street
“Time doesn’t exist. In fact, it never existed,” Hanane mumbles aloud while waiting her turn. It’s been nineteen years now that she’s waiting her turn in the cramped room on the second floor of the G Building on rue Trabaud, a narrow street on the East Side of Beirut.
While climbing the stairs two by two, she met the old lady who lives on the third floor. She pretended not to see her. Since she regained the use of her feet, she only takes the stairs. Upon reaching the landing, she looked at her watch. The hands showed 11:45. And we’ve reduced nothingness to this — she said to herself — to stupid hands on a watch. Time is nothing but an invention, an illusion. It’s not time that contains us — she tells herself — it’s we who perceive it. Time is emptiness that our consciousness makes measurable.
She wanted to share her discovery with her shrink. The prospect of talking about it makes her feverish. It was already 11:46 when she crossed the doorstep into the waiting room. She sat down, like always, on the armchair next to a coffee table, buckling under the weight of newspapers placed there to kill time.
The decor hasn’t changed in nineteen years. She bears a grudge against the patient before her who is encroaching on her time. Forty-five minutes of consultation. Not one minute more. She knows her shrink is inflexible, but today she’ll tell him — even if this means going over her allotted time.