They were having a great time. The second vet got a chair from Bill's table and dragged it over and Bill sat down and ate another piece of meat. The waiter arrived with brandy and they ordered more wine.
They decided to go to a nightclub along the coast, a place where Lebanese in large numbers took their exile and longing. Bill sat jammed in a corner of the taxi feeling muddled and blurred. Muzzy. This was a word he hadn't heard or thought of in many years. The vets were trying to get the driver to improvise a verse for Kataklysmos, an important local feast in memory of the flood.
The club was large and crowded. A middle-aged woman with a hand mike moved among the tables singing laments in Arabic and French. Bill sat drinking at the end of a banquette packed solid with the three original vets and two others found wandering outside. The original woman let him lay a bent hand on her loamy thigh. A champagne cork shot out of a bottle about every forty seconds. Bill thought he saw his book across the room, obese and lye-splashed, the face an acid spatter, zipped up and decolored, with broken teeth glinting out of the pulp. It was so true and real it briefly cleared his muzziness. Couples stood clinging on the dance floor and a champagne bottle exploded in someone's face, the man standing in a creamy flash of blood and foam and looking down at the damage to his suit. There were fashion references everywhere, women wearing skull jewelry and several young bravos in camouflage sunglasses and pieces of militia gear. Arguments spread around the room, the champagne came sluicing with a bang and Bill thought there was a two-hearted mood in the air, a reflectiveness at the center of the noise and babble, a yearning for home that had a secret hidden inside it, the shared awareness that they did not want to escape the war, that the war was pulling them into it and they were here to join hands and death-dance willingly past the looted hotels and the fields of tumbled stonework. And he looked at the weird little man in whiteface going up on the small stage to sing "Mack the Knife" in Louis Armstrong's voice, a perfect chilling imitation of the famous sweet-potato growl, and Bill hated hearing that sound coming out of a fold-up body that lives in a suitcase, it was awful, it was damn scary, but the vets were fascinated, not a whisper or blink, it was the shark song they'd been waiting for all night, the cataclysmic verse.
It hurt to breathe. He moved his hand along the woman's thigh. There was something about her hair being cut straight across the forehead that made him think he was feeling up a teacher in a storeroom filled with the new-penny freshness of school supplies. Oh God make her let me do it to her. Later in the men's room Bill and the bearded vet walked right past each other without a word or sign. Seemed natural enough in the episodic course of a long night among strangers in a distant city. It felt to Bill that a life had come and gone since the segment on the promenade with a sea breeze and colored bulbs.
When he woke up on the hotel bed he was in his shorts, still wearing his socks and one shoe. It took him a while to figure out where he was. Once he had this settled he tried to recall how he'd made it back. He had no memory of leaving the nightclub. It frightened him, it made him see himself banging into walls, stagger-drunk in the dark somewhere. The danger of the world is immense. He saw it now, how dumb and lucky he'd been, testing that peril. There was one cigarette in the pack. He took off his shoe and had a smoke. Strange to think of himself in lost time, managing any number of delicate maneuvers, shuffling, trailing the hash of a lifespan. It frightened and humbled him but also made him feel darkly charmed.
He remembered the important things, how the boy who ate grasshoppers opened his mouth to show part of a wing and an eye and the juices of the chomped-up body leaking through his teeth.
He went into the bathroom to spit. He hawked it up and spat it out. He urinated. He shook the last drop of pee off his dick. This was his life. He put the cigarette on the glass shelf and washed his face. He dried himself and went to sit at the edge of the bed, smoking intently, studying the cigarette in his hand, what a sweet idea, a small roll of finely cut tobacco enclosed in a wrapper of thin paper, meant to spring a pleasure in the head. Funny how he'd never noticed.
He'd removed his pants, or someone had, without taking off his left shoe. What serene traces of queerness spelt out across the night. He wanted this smoke to last about four more drags and saw it didn't have but two and felt a mood come upon him of soulful loss.
He slept for some hours. It appeared to be early evening when he got up. He called downstairs and they gave him the name and address of a doctor he might talk to. He got dressed, feeling altogether fine, ready to forget the doctor, then thinking better of it, then ready to forget again, feeling hungry, always a sign of resurgence.
He decided he would see the doctor. Before walking out the door, he called the shipping office on an impulse. They told him the ferry was running again.
He patted himself down for passport, wallet and traveler's checks. He dropped his things in the bag and went down to check out. At the shipping office he stood in a line of exactly three people, himself included. He looked at posters of sunsets and tawny coasts. A man came in with cups of coffee and glasses of cold water on a round metal tray that was suspended from wire struts. It felt like a moment with a history. The clerk made a gesture and they each took a cup and stood around talking.
"Now how far is it to the port of Junieh?"
The clerk said, "Roughly in kilometers maybe two hundred forty."
"And from Junieh to Beirut, what do I do?" Bill said.
"Taxi distance. Take a taxi."
"Will they overcharge me?"
"Of course."
"What about the holes in the boat? All repaired?"
A round of amusement here, the others sharing some joke without a word or glance.
"Don't worry about the holes."
"All repaired?" Bill said.
"The holes are well above the waterline."
"We don't speak about the holes," another customer said.
"The holes are but details," the clerk said.
Bill sniffed the grounds at the bottom of his cup, trying to outfox the pain, maneuver past it.
"Now what about the truce? Does it look serious this time?"
"They're all serious. You can't look at a cease-fire and say this one lasts, that one has no chance. They're all serious and they never last."
"But does the truce affect the safety of the ferry? Do the terms of a truce include gunboats at sea?"
"The sea is nothing," the clerk said.
"We don't speak about the sea," the other customer said.
"The sea is a detail compared to the land."
He paid for his ticket with traveler's checks and the clerk asked him if he had a visa. Bill did not. The clerk asked him if he had a waiver from the State Department and Bill had never heard of such a thing.
"Never mind. There is always a way."
"What's the way?" Bill said.
"When you get to Junieh you go to passport control and you will see a man from the Lebanese Forces. Always there is someone. He has a uniform, a rubber stamp and an ink pad. Tell him you're a writer."
"Okay, I'm a writer."
"Tell him you would like press credentials. Maybe he suggests some money will change hands. Then he stamps something on a piece of paper and you are now under the protection of the main Christian militia."
"And I don't need a visa to get into the country."
"You are completely free to enter."
"And how much money is changing hands?"
"If you are willing to pay to get into a city like Beirut, I don't think you care how much."
He stood on deck and was surprised to see them come aboard, easily a hundred people, some with children, with infants pouched in sleep across a breast or shoulder. The gulls rocked high in the burning light. He thought it was touching and brave and these people were dear to him, families, cartons, shopping bags, babies, the melodious traffic of a culture.