But he seemed not to understand anything I said. I remembered what he told me about his head and his eyes. And I gathered that his head perhaps understood my words but his eyes, no.
To make matters easier and not just for his eyes, for myself also, I simplified the story: “Let’s start with the shop. You see it every day. It will be taken apart. The display. The stuff in it. The shelves. The refrigerators. The magazine displays. The cash register. The scale for vegetables and fruit. The storage room at the back. The bathroom. The basement filled with rats and mice. Everything in it will decompose into small pieces and wait. What we will have at the bottom of the street won’t be a shop but a mound of these pieces mixed up all together. But gathering together all these pieces and returning them to what they were isn’t difficult. Because each of them has a special sign. And the boxes that we will send up into space will leave. That’s for sure. But they’ll come back to us one day with special signs for everything as a whole. We will compile a big dictionary of all these signs. The biggest dictionary of life. Of everything in life.”
He asked me, “Does every star in the sky have a special sign for it too?”
“Of course,” I answered fervently, and then added, “I heard that gathering all these pieces together will fall on our shoulders. This is what older people always do with younger people. We have to be prepared. The wooden boxes are my plan. What I told you about the shop will also happen to the incline, the football stadium, the Ferris wheel at the amusement park, the Rawda coffee shop, the pool, every building, shop, closet, washing machine, television, window, metal... everything. We’ll move this entire incline somewhere else and it will become ours. We could even set it up differently than it is now. We could, for example, return it to what it used to be. To years past. If we seize the signs, the incline will be ours. Yours and mine.”
But he was silent. He showed no interest whatsoever in the question of owning the incline. But he asked me, “If everything disintegrates into fragments, what will we do when the small wooden boxes also decompose into fragments? Yes. How do you know they won’t decompose before coming back to us?”
I was struck dumb.
Then he asked, “Has your tongue decomposed, Eraser?”
I stuck out my tongue at him to show him that it was still there. Then we started laughing very hard. I was sure that when I laughed with Nazmi, a thick, cool, white foam was intensifying, taking on the form of birds near a wooden bench for strange people who we don’t know. The people feed seeds to that foam, thinking that it’s really birds, and when they feed it, it increases and thickens further and we can no longer stop laughing.
3.
I’m not a clever box maker. Especially small boxes. I use the wood that Nazmi brings to me, cutting it with a blade. Though it’s fine wood and possible to break by hand, or by foot, I used to cut it with a knife. By hand or foot, splinters fall from it that I then have to snap with my fingers.
Once, while I was passing the blade over a wooden board, it left a dark line that wasn’t lead but looked like it. I deduced that I had to use a lead pencil to mark the wood before cutting it. I started putting it behind my ear like carpenters do when walking down the street. Because I was afraid that the blade had done that in order to join the lead pencil to it, while I was away at work. The next day I brought the blade a home, a broken case. After work, I inserted a screw into the blade’s open belly and twisted it a little so it couldn’t come out of the case and injure anyone. Because it wasn’t designed to cut wood, I avoided putting pressure on it during work so it wouldn’t get stuck inside the wood or harm its blade. This would have required me to pass over the same line again, and this is what explains my long-term obsession with constructing boxes. People used to call this “respect.” But it caused my fingertips to swell. Though I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry even once, especially not in front of the boxes.
I also had nails, thread, pipe, glue, and adhesive tape. I didn’t use the nails but saved them until I could buy a hammer. Sometimes I cut the thread with my teeth and sometimes that hurt. Once I lost a milk tooth when the thread got stuck around it when I was pulling on it. Right afterward, mothers in the building started to use string to pull out their children’s loose teeth.
In the evening, I used to tuck the small boxes into my schoolbag. I would refuse to let my mother sell the bag at the end of the summer like she did at the beginning of every school year. But I didn’t completely fill the bag with boxes. I had to leave some space. A space the size of the sleeve of a sweater. I’m not talking about the sleeve of my sweater, but the sleeve of Nazmi’s sweater. Nazmi, who was perhaps my friend and perhaps not. What I do know is that Nazmi was three or four years older than me, and after I tucked the boxes in the bag, I was sure that the empty space left was the size of his hand. Every day, I kept saying to myself, Today. Today I will let him take the first box from the bag.
But I didn’t follow through on my decision after all. I didn’t trust Nazmi’s ability to control his strength, especially when he was excited. What if his hand broke the box while removing it from the bag? Shattered it into fragments? We would fight. Nazmi would be angry and feel sorry for me, and he would kneel in front of the building’s entrance and hit his head against the edge of the cement until it bled. As usual, children his own age would circle around him and make fun of him. I was really afraid of the sight of blood. Even before the war came down onto our street overlooking the sea. It dates back to the time I saw Zuhayr, the son of the vegetable seller, covered in blood after he fell from the chains of the spinning electric swing in the amusement park. Nazmi didn’t apologize. Because no one taught him that when we make a mistake we apologize. But we knew it. Everyone in the neighborhood knew it. When he made a mistake, he would do everything he could to convince us that it wouldn’t happen again. So the next time Nazmi would insist on taking the first box out of the bag, but I was sure that he — like the time before — would crush it in his strong hand like a cookie. Because I really loved him, I didn’t want Nazmi to hit his head on the cement and cry. I really did love him. But I feared for the boxes. I couldn’t show him my love because I feared for the boxes. Because Nazmi didn’t only get attached to people quickly, but also their things.
One Tuesday evening, I put all the small wooden boxes in my bag. I climbed up to the roof of the building. The sky was clear and smooth. I smiled, saying to myself, There’s no mucus tonight. We used to consider the clouds a collection of strips of mucus. So I thought: We can choose an endless number of stars so that we can leave some for the next day. I waited for Nazmi. But after many hours, the stars started getting bigger, inflating, swelling up. They became faces. They moved from one side of the sky to the other. I was no longer able to follow how they flowed through the sky. They used to bump into each other like marbles. Giant marbles. And they emitted terrible sounds. They split open the edge of the roof and the flimsy aluminum antennas, which we used to bend on purpose as revenge against the neighbors who treated Nazmi badly when he delivered gas canisters to them. Indeed, even the Ferris wheel at the amusement park started shaking to the right and left like a giant coin. It was lit up. But I didn’t leave. I opened the bag and looked at the boxes. Then I looked again at the stars. I measured them. Lengthwise and then crosswise. From where I was standing on the rooftop. I only used two fingers. That was the latest method I’d discovered to measure the size of the stars.