To his arsenal of methods for influencing girls’ minds, he added numerous stories about his childhood, a series of anecdotes that were almost totally fabricated. One such story, which was basically an altered version of the plot to a movie he had just seen, made him out to be of Italian origin, though he didn’t speak his native tongue. He had supposedly been born in a popular neighbourhood in Naples, the one with the steps leading down to the sea. His mother had whisked him away to the United States for fear he would get caught up in the mafia when he grew up, because his uncles were all involved in it and topped the Carabinieri’s most wanted list. Or, in a turn to the East, he claimed to be originally from the Yemeni city of Taiz and to have been raised between two deserts — the Empty Quarter and Badiyat al-Sham. His father was supposedly an elder in the Shammar tribe who had been convinced by an old English friend from Her Majesty’s Secret Service of the benefits of higher education and so he sent his son — Eliyya that is — to America. This father of his had had the final word at the legendary meeting convened under a tent, where coffee was served to the seated guests, who chose their words carefully as they discussed the issue of whether to lend their support to the government in Sana’a or send secret envoys to hold talks with communist rebels in Aden.
Eliyya’s constant attempts to escape getting caught forced him to change his phone number frequently, until he finally stopped giving his number to anybody and requested to have his name removed from the phone book. And when email became widespread he made up countless email addresses for himself so no one could reach him. He would create an address one day, send messages from it, and then abandon it and switch to another address to avoid receiving the replies. Soon afterwards he created a website under a fake name, though it was derived from his real name — the same website the Gang Quarter kids had discovered — and avoided befriending anyone with any connection to the land of his birth.
He wouldn’t even make friends with anyone who knew Arabic. People who knew him and liked him insisted that his lying wasn’t some kind of a hobby to him; rather, he felt compelled to say what his acquaintances wanted to hear. If he met someone who was trying to find a quick way to get a residency visa, for example, Eliyya simply could not stop himself from claiming he knew some higher-up in the Department of Immigration who could help him. Eliyya would then give him a full name he’d made up on the spot or borrowed from somewhere and promise the applicant he would call him as soon as possible, assuring him it was a done deal and that the immigration office employee owed him a big favour worth much more than a simple residency visa. And that would be their last conversation, since Eliyya would choose to stay out of that friend’s sight after that. Eliyya also invented two or three serious diseases for himself, kidney failure with required dialysis sessions, bouts of acute shortness of breath and even leukaemia, and he would reveal his diseases to anyone who tried to confront him, turning their indignation about being lied to into sympathy for him.
Time flew past Eliyya; quick as an arrow, life was passing him by. The daily chronicles of his life seemed like one long holiday, yet he never found a way to rest. And he wasn’t spared of feelings of boredom and repetitiveness, not just repetition of the details, but of that scenario he kept falling into without meaning to. Something had begun to slowly slip away from his routine, despite his always being prepared and ready to go, rising every morning as if he had vital duties to carry out and which he took on with optimism.
But Eliyya began to chastise himself. A person who lives alone eventually ends up talking to himself. He rebuked himself in the shower or whenever he lay down for a little while after lunch and stared at the ceiling. If he found himself all alone in the elevator, he looked at himself in the mirror, sometimes thrusting his thumb at his image and waving his fist threateningly at himself. He interrogated himself out loud at the diner, Jack’s, where he sometimes went at noon, so that the waitress thought he was trying to capture her attention, forcing him to quickly excuse himself in embarrassment. If he were to write down all the censure he constantly heaped on himself, or if he were able to say it out loud to someone, it would no doubt be harsh. ‘Stop it, Eliyya. Dammit, stop! Don’t you realise you’re overdoing it? Haven’t you gotten tired of feigning desire every time some blonde’s hair unfurls in some place, on some street, some café, some store? One blonde after another… the whole country is nothing but blondes, so what’s the point?’
Once, with a woman named Julie, Eliyya became indifferent towards her the moment the dye faded from her hair. Even he couldn’t believe his sudden change in feelings. She cried, demanding an explanation, but he couldn’t explain. The moment he caught a glimpse of a blonde passing by, his antennas went up and he started preparing his lines. He’d start with a pomegranate juice mixed with soda — the deep red colour in the glass made a good opening to intimate chatter that ended the same way every time. To keep up his charade one time in front of a girl, he guzzled down a whole glass of vodka and lemon into the back of his throat, the way he was told Russians do at their boisterous banquets. He nearly choked and his eyes bulged out of his head, so they lifted him up high so he could spit the vodka from his throat and slapped him in the face until he came to.
He laid it all out on the table whenever a girl sat down in front of him: other people’s expressions and proverbs, plus a repertoire of stories he had made up only moments earlier while riding the subway to his date. Stories he drew inspiration for from anything he had read, trying at any cost to create the impression of himself as a genius wandering the sidewalks of New York City, or that the Middle East had spit out into the new world once again because the East could not bear the presence of minorities. He would describe places he never visited in his life with sincere and poetic nostalgia and then get up all of a sudden once he’d made certain from the look in the girl’s eyes that the scheme had worked yet again. He had succeeded in painting a bizarre picture of himself that opened up numerous possibilities to his new friend, things she never expected to come upon in her monotonous life that kept him in an unquenchable state of desire for what he believed women possessed but which he hadn’t yet been fortunate enough to obtain. He would do his dance and then suddenly, like every other time, make up something about having to go home right away and offer the girl a ride home. He would leave, calm and collected, convinced that his phone would ring the next day or the day after that, and the seduction he’d started would reach its conclusion as the activities of daytime made their way onto night’s stage. He was good at the game, too, even though it had started to unravel from overuse. Once he succeeded at a certain restaurant, he regarded it as lucky and returned again and again. He’d take women there one after the other, calling the waiters by their first names, all part and parcel of his seduction toolkit.