Chastity and Fidelity were looking real nasty in my craney now, I could only vision those snapshots where they were ugliest, where I felt they were most inauthentic, and I could remember distinctly and in a demonically distorted way every time they talked or smiled or winked at each other without me knowing why.
The nastiest snapshot of them all was when I gave them the liras. They snatched away at the cash like junkies and they quickly melted it in a blackened tired spoon and injected their veins with green. Fidelity’s nostrils leaked green and I got frightened when I looked. She smiled stupidly and her teeth were deep green.
So I walked and I walked and Bourj Hammoud is what I left behind. I passed by Karantina. Oh good fuckin’ God, what aroma! I inhaled gloriously. Hmmmm, oh the marvelous smell of the total surrender of the diseased and the deceased to come. Karantina, baby boys, all the fuckin’ foreign niggers and yellows rotting in their foreign diseases, and seeping through the walls decades of Falestinian and Christian blood. Genocides leak for a good while, ya know? And the earth is ever-thirsty for more. A very charming place, walla. Top of the list for things to see if you’re passing through.
The alleys are very narrow in Beirut so there is almost never a horizon. We can’t eye the sky anymore, a web of electric wires shades the sun, and there was a little moonlight zebrafying the whole landscape.
Shit, I couldn’t even feel my Eri.
Oh good God, it was almost day. Fuckin’ lovely. Yalla, prepare ourselves: the soundtrack of Beirut in the morning we will ear in a while for it is dawn. Time for work and prayer, oh you little shits! Yalla, wake the fuck up!
I waited.
The first ziggurat chanter hit the first note. Envy stirred all the others and an amalgam of chanters shattered the cold morning sky, competing in volume and in a very Oriental way, constantly evading the right notes to praise the Allah. Oh yes, we prance around him, the Allah and his Prophet, ya know, that’s why we can’t draw them. They feed on vagueness, and they wither away if defined.
For you see, me broder, we play music and pray to God the same way we speak here, yamin shemal, left and right, nothing we say means what you think it means.
Westerners, they usually get to the point quite quickly. We in Arab Bay insinuate everything we want and eventually, as a consequence, our musical notes as well. Might this be it? Or this or that? Who knows? And a sitar goes wild in the background to emphasize the existential disaster. Tininini. Who knows? Tininininini. Wlik, who knooooows? And then we fall into the Tarab state, which is a typically Oriental state of musical mystical ecstasy, and we are thrown yamin shemal from one yalatifness to another, and we weep out of delight as we’re flashbacking to memories of first kisses, premature ejaculations, and warm milk from well-endowed mothers, and then, at last, after such a long, painful wait, when he, or she, hits that note, that fuckin’ note we came to ear, we just flip backward, shiver and quiver while foaming on the floor, socially aware no longer, space and time coagulating into one, our teeth clicketing and clacketing. Yeah, we fall, ya akhi. Again, in a very clumsy Oriental kind of way.
As for the West, these Catholic Nazis, well, they hit a sol diez, stop at that, ponder, mutter a boring hmmm, and write it down on old parchment and dream of glory forever as they are devising the next note. Do you think such a culture, even if given all the time in the world, can devise something so repetitive and so pointless and yet so hypnotizing like swirling dervishes or belly dancers? Of course not, they don’t have the total lack of discipline and the easiness of elation we have.
As for our Muslim chanters, oh they never stop chanting their monotonous chanting. Fugue after fugue after fugue. Fuguing and prancing here and there, bouhouhouing five times a day, and the swings of personnel are necessary, of course, because it is a very hard job to cry genuinely all the time.
And I’ve grown tired of prancing, to be honest, and I ache for a bit of Nazi in my soup really. Some order, some discipline, some straightforward speech, get to the fuckin’ point, don’t interrupt! I wish we were Germans, man, we would wait with anticipation for the verb. We Arabs, on the other hand, put the verb first then shit two hundred adjectives and go hahaha then bouhouhou all of a sudden and reminisce then reluctantly place a point while panting. And we are always shocked when we are interrupted.
From afar the ziggurat looks like a gigantic archaic razor. The real tangible filth can only be experienced once you get near. The whole thing triangular and black or straight-up sky-scratcher material, panoramic and black. It’s always black anyway. All the temples of God are painted black now.
So many times have I wished to set all these goddamn temples on fire. Yes, I am a man of god (well, I was) and I crave to see all His temples razed to the ground, yes mortals, for the Lord He is offended by your edifices. Your temples are but abominations in the eyes of our Lord God. Aaaaaaah fuck this. Set them all on fire mygod, aaaaaaamen baby boys, my order first and then all the remaining ones, all of them. All of them, I pray to god. All of them, goddamn ignorant cunts looking up, always looking up and waiting, looking so unevolved and all, instead of looking in and laughing so much everything around us is so fuckin’ hilarious.
The ruin might be heartbreaking, it’s true (just like all ruins are). But the children will finally have the fuckin’ space they need to play at ease. And whatever you were afraid of will be gone, and all the lilylilhoes will be virgins again, I swear. No harm done, Hymen. The betrothed of thee, Antigone, oh he will come back and save thee on time. Just you wait. Be patient. Be good. And kill the clergy every chance you get.
5:05
Khalas, it is known, I might be awful in every single way, but seriously, look at this place! Akh Ya Allah. Look at it. It is done. It can no longer last. Just look at it, ya akhi. The knees of this place are shaking under the weight.
I have to leave this hellhole of a godless, dripping-with-disease place before it blows in my fuckin’ face.
No Ka in my spine, of course. My bones are hollow and the forty-seven winds of the East blow through them.
I craved to be clean so I could just walk safely home. I don’t know why, but something felt very unright and not even getting home offered me consolation. Something in my belly was going crunchy crunch, and it was not butterflies. Nothing this sugary, I’m sure. I felt as if there were a satanic baby inside me, screeching and squealing with black horns and green ejaculations from every hole in its body, and eating avidly at my insides with fork and scissors.
05:36
He climbed the last flight of stairs, went toward the fronty-door, head facing hell, looked through his pockets, clickety clack, where for art thou keys, clickety clack click clack, where for art thou? Can’t we simply barge into our own houses?
The door squeaked open.
“Dirty Teeth!” She paused. “Priest Renzin akhiran decides to show up.” She was waiting for me, in the dark, on the stairs, like a gargoyle from Notre Dame de la Faillite.
I was not startled. No, I just closed my eyes in an I-knew-it kinda way. I looked at her.
“What are you doing here?”
“Can I come in first?”
No.
No.
No.
Fuck no.
No fuckin’ chance in fuckin’ hell no.
“Sure.”
Eesh went in first, her bag jingling jangling, and her hair pitchblacking the little light there was. He followed her in and closed the door behind him. And as the door closed, his stomach churned the way it churned when he would lock himself outside without the keys, or worse, when you closed the door on a chunk of your gut.