“My mother keeps forbidding me to put the hourglass away. She says that she needs to have it there on the mantelpiece to remember my father. I still see him, sitting on his armchair. Just as the sand flowed through it, his head nodded from side to side. The problem is measurement. The neighbor’s screams are also a measurement. And then his head fell, soft like death. But life is also soft. I want to be so steep that nothing can move across me. Not your eyes, not your thoughts. I want to be steeper than time. This morning I passed by the hourglass and felt nothing for the first time. Do you know why? Because I discovered that time doesn’t exist. I should have thought about this earlier. I am my own free will. Only I, and I alone, can put an end to everything. God, time, eternity. I crush them. Like insects. It is enough just to think about it. Time doesn’t exist. Exit, time. Exit. Pshhht.”
“So what did you write down today other than that time doesn’t exist? After all, today is the 20th of January.”
“Nothing. Didn’t feel like it.” Then she corrects herself: “Oh yes, I wrote down that Kalthoum Sarrai died.”
“Don’t know her.”
“She played the part of Super Nanny in the French version of a show by that same name. She died of cancer. Like me. I died of that too.”
Her shrink frowns. He doesn’t like it when she starts using the past tense to speak about the future. He is quick to follow up: “What do you know about your own death?”
“Everything.”
“What do you mean, everything?”
“Just that.”
“And what about joy? Won’t you ever list that?”
“Joy is flat.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. Flat. As flat as the Beqaa Valley.” She pantomimes a flat surface with her hands.
“But at the end of the day, all you mark down on your list are disasters, dictatorships, epidemics, and cancers. History has also known happy occasions... And friends? Don’t you have any that bring you joy?”
“Sure I do, but they’re all flat too.”
When her responses become incomprehensible, he knows it’s pointless to press on. But he always tries nonetheless. He wants to understand why Hanane persists in never listing events before 1992, the year her father died. Every time he has pursued this question with her, she has retreated into herself. Her retreat starts with her eyes. Her ability to talk follows, it becomes confused and then she’s silent. He tries in vain to tell her that she can’t mourn for so many years, but she absolutely refuses to touch the 20th of Januaries before the ones already on her list. Yet it’s his responsibility. Before the end of each session, he always mentions it. This time he grasps at a straw.
“But if time doesn’t exist, you could add the nonexistence of events before 1992 to your list.”
“It isn’t necessary to predict everything,” she answers tersely. Ever since she first deciphered his methods of diversion, she’s found it ludicrous to sidle up to madness.
The young woman’s closed expression makes him understand that a locked world has descended upon her. Her sense of urgency from the beginning of the session is now nothing but a memory. She doesn’t even take her crumpled list out of her pocket, as she always does when she wants to drown the silence with frantic movements. She will freeze, stand up, and, for the first time since she’s been coming to him, approach his desk. She doesn’t tell him that she finds him cowardly. Instead, she stares at him and with a sharp motion, thrusts out her hand to him.
Hanane has never yet shown any desire for physical contact whatsoever. Disconcerted, he holds his hand out to her in return. Her eyes focus on him, but she doesn’t make any another movement. Nervously, he leans slightly toward her. When their fingers touch, Hanane’s hand is as cold as a cadaver’s.
The next Wednesday Hanane doesn’t come, though she hadn’t canceled her appointment. Opening his office door, the shrink finds Hanane’s mother sitting in her daughter’s usual place. He motions for her to enter. The mother shakes her head and hands him a piece of paper. He immediately recognizes Hanane’s list of her life’s 20th of Januaries. This scrap of paper no longer looks like anything. He smoothes it out. A single date has been added to the list. A date before 1992. A January 20th in the year 1985. Next to the year he can read:
Strange body penetrated my body. This isn’t about time, God, or eternity. It is about my father’s dick. When his penis entered my body, time left. That hurt, and then nothing. “A trickle of blood doesn’t matter,” my father said. When I saw victims of the war on TV, that also didn’t matter. Pain is immobile. So are we. Chronos isn’t time. Time isn’t time. Where I am, time is. I kill myself because metastasis is imminent. Cancer is lucidity. Everything hates us. The past. The future. They hate each other. Chronology is nothing but an illusion. We are victims of the compression of nothingness into a notion called time... it’s pain that makes eternity, not time.
Her mother found the scrap of paper next to her daughter’s lifeless body on the day after January 20, 2011. Next to her in bloodred was written: Time doesn’t exist. I cut off its head.
Originally written in French.
Part II
Panorama of the Soul
Beirut Apples
by Leila Eid
Bourj Hammoud
October 10. The tenth day of the tenth month. Hah, oh my God.
10/10... it’s my birthday... What if they came back? Just like that, and walked through this door right now at their real, young ages. Amer, my father; Farah, my mother (I used to joke and tease her when she’d get angry at me and cry, reminding her that her name meant joy); Amir, Rustum, and Zeina, my siblings — they are bringing me little gifts and a big birthday cake. Would they know me now that I’m older than them? I’d perhaps be a more appropriate father to them now than a brother, even though I was the eldest child. As for Amer and Farah, I’m nearly their age and we’ve become close friends. Who knows, perhaps we’d sit together and reminisce about our childhood and adolescence.
But how would they know my address? And if they knew it, would I even see them? Can the dead come back to life? What if they hadn’t died, and I’d merely imagined this — what if they were alive and remembering me? Do I really want to see them? Do I really want to see anyone? Me — who’s walking terrified, pressed up against every wall on the ship, as if I were a shadow, trying to hide from the apparition of a human, cat, or even a mouse, seeking shelter in the closest container or near a broken lamppost. I wait, trembling and shivering like someone touched by madness.
I didn’t sleep after I heard Amer saying that night, “Farah, Farah, we can’t stay here much longer... Listen to me... we’ve become nothing but live offerings, ready victims, even if they haven’t announced it openly... As soon as one person is killed or kidnapped in the capital, we’ll be the first revenge, the surrogate for unknown blood spilled in a dark and unjust dispute. They killed Samer that night. No one could protect him... They said that five masked men abducted him from his house after they raped his wife in front of him. They showed mercy to his children when they shoved them into the bathroom, threatening to pour cold water on them if they so much as made a single sound. His eldest son was not so lucky, his arm was broken — his siblings heard it crack — when he attempted to scream, calling for help, trying to defend his parents. They were stricken by what seemed like a mute stupor... They executed Samer right there behind the olive press. Jihad, Rameh, and I saw a wet explosion, red splattered on the wall...