My intense love for boxes made me want to visit a number of places around the world with them. When I thought about all the countries of the world, I thought about the amusement parks in those countries. And I decided to not take the boxes there. No doubt, like me they would see many children flying toward giant, colorful rides — swinging and flying and crawling and bouncing around — and not one of them would be interested in what a small box could do. In those foreign countries I wouldn’t allow myself to wander around among the children whose languages I couldn’t even speak, to convince them of the power of a small box to carry the whole world around in parts and move it to other places.
For the sake of these boxes alone, not for my own sake, I wanted to copy myself like you copy a piece of paper in a photocopy machine. Then I would put each copy of myself into a small box. Afterward, I would become closed and empty like them. And I would leave the boxes in places far away from each other. Nothing would bring them together. One of the places would perhaps be a cave. Perhaps the second place would be some fancy, decorated trunk at the bottom of the sea. Perhaps the third place would be a hill of debris made of old telephones in a village very far from here.
2.
That was all I wanted to know about the power of small wooden boxes before I got close to Nazmi. I became his good friend when he started to help me collect wood. He used to steal it from the shop at the bottom of the slope, where he worked. But this shouldn’t lead anyone to believe that he was one of those bad boys in the neighborhood. As for me, when I learned the wood was stolen I didn’t get angry with him. I didn’t care about the circumstances that brought the wood to my house. Indeed, I urged him to bring more. I would use all the expressions that meant bring me when I talked to him. But I didn’t ever once utter the word steal.
It’s important to remember the first time we had a conversation about the usefulness of wood. I realized that he was a simple man and that is all anyone knew about him. My realization was not because of my great insight. No boy of eleven is able to use insightful as word to describe himself. I believe in order to be insightful you shouldn’t ever sleep. You should constantly observe everything around you. Like someone spying on everything — no matter whether moving or still — in order to live some additional days. I can’t be insightful. I don’t want to warn anyone about anything. It’s as if I need to sleep and practice closing my eyelids vertically, and I still can’t manage to do it. I can’t speak about the paths of the planets, or about people’s lives either, because I haven’t delved into these things. I don’t mind becoming a part of any life that others might suggest for me in the future; however, I’m busy right now. I don’t have time. My preoccupations are deep and confined to the boxes. Raising them higher. I don’t know how.
In addition to the question of the eyelids, I also have to practice rolling on the rug, as I mentioned before. Then there’s my interest in Nazmi’s story. Now. Telling it with no additions or deletions. Because he was simple and his life didn’t require any explanations, excess letters, or doctors. In the beginning of our friendship he assigned me the nickname “Eraser.” The name embarrassed me. It embarrassed me a lot and I was afraid it would stick to me. But then I added up the weight of his daily misery — carrying heavy gas cylinders on his shoulder, from the foot of the hill all the way up to the top, to the top floor of the tallest building, so he could install it with the help of a heavy screwdriver — “the wrench,” as we used to call it. Sometimes he had to go back down the hill again to the street and search for it because it had slipped out of the back pocket of his loose trousers without him noticing. When I thought about all this, I felt that Eraser was a nice compensation. And that he wouldn’t call me this name were he not convinced of my ability to erase his daily misery in minutes, those very same minutes we spend at night on the roof of the building throwing wooden boxes in the air.
“Up! Up! To the top of the hill! To the top floor!” he shouted, shutting his eyes tight. He closed them as if they were extraneous things on his face.
So I corrected him: “The sky isn’t the beginning of the incline, and it isn’t the top floor at the beginning of the incline. The sky is farther away. A lot farther than that. Farther than the top of a column or the horn of a truck.”
He asked me, “When will we get there?”
He often asked questions like this. Difficult ones that I didn’t know anything about. I felt that these questions were very serious. More serious than me and all my thoughts. They used to spoil my woodworking projects for a moment. But I started to love him like someone who loves a burden. A burden of small boxes. Indeed, I felt that I was responsible for him, so I shared my secret with him about the relationship of boxes to space, and particularly the stars. He hadn’t seen stars before. That’s what he told me. I got frustrated a lot. And I blamed him. But he’d be perplexed and tell me that this wasn’t a fault of his whole body, but a fault of his head alone, in fact a very small part of his head, the part that hadn’t ever thought of looking at the sky at night...
But from the time he first found out about the existence of stars, he started carrying gas canisters to houses along the incline all day long — up Beirut’s Caracas Hill — while staring at the sky. He would stare and wonder if the stars were really there. Are all these stars merely a trick of the night? I am sure he meant an evil trick. I expended all my energy trying to convince him that the stars were actually there, but I couldn’t. I didn’t care. Until one evening when I told him, “We’ll throw wooden boxes up toward space.”
And he followed up enthusiastically, “Stars?”
But I carried on, ignoring what he was saying because I had started to get irritated. “The boxes will come back to us bringing us things that no one has read about before. Special kinds of signs. Small, secret signs, lost long ago, which will ride in the boxes. Because they have been waiting for the boxes for a long time. Someday, you and I will get all these boxes after they come back. We will catch things much more valuable than stars. We will catch a dictionary.”
I told him this in a serious tone. But after that I tried at home to speculate as to what these signs that I’d mentioned could mean to him. I needed only one sign, one clear and obvious sign easy for a young boy like me to explain to someone. To Nazmi. To convince him of it and its relevance to all things in existence. His imagination was weak. He felt that his head lived on its own, although the two of them — him and his head — were attached. Like a medicine capsule. I used to notice that his head was really oval shaped. He laughed and I laughed along with him. He said, “My head lives above me. It sees everything it wants, it doesn’t care, I have nothing to do with it. As for me, I live underneath it. I have two eyes that I can’t see without. I see with them and I only think things that come to me through them.”
For a moment I was convinced that Nazmi wasn’t just a simple child. But all that disappeared when I realized that I needed a sign. A special sign that he’d seen before and through which he could be convinced of my secret about the relationship of boxes to space.
I recalled all the conversations that we’d had. The next day, I resolved to emerge from this battle victorious. I told him, “You know, in olden times, there were people like us. But this incline wasn’t here. Where was it? Scattered all around somewhere else. It’s merely ‘things’ collected from faraway places that were brought here. They came here and became an incline. But someone collected these things. Perhaps it was a boy. Merely a boy like us. He used wooden boxes or perhaps he had a different way. The important thing is that he collected them, guided by signs. Special signs. Every ‘thing’ has a special mark, distinguishing it from any other ‘thing.’ Everything becomes old and rots. Like bread. It crumbles. Even if you do everything you can to prevent it. Even if you go now and use all the strength in your arms to set up the incline in reverse, it would rot and everything in it would also rot after a while.”