Melanie opened a shoebox on the cable-spool coffee table. “Smell,” she said, holding a sprig of marijuana under my nose. “It’s great stuff.”
“It smells great, but I’m sure it’s not as good as hash. In Lebanon, we throw this out. Hash is the pollen.” I sat back and almost knocked a chrome lamp over.
“I don’t think I want to throw out this grass.” Mike smiled as he walked to his entertainment center and put an Al Di Meola record on. Melanie rolled a joint using a contraption with a Stars and Stripes motif. She lit the joint and passed it to me. “This is good shit.”
The first hit went straight to my head. I petted the dog, who jumped up on the sofa and put his head on my lap. “He likes you,” Mike said.
“I had a wonderful dog called Tulip who died of a heart attack over a year ago.”
“Your dad told me the dog was run over by a car,” Melanie said.
“No, no. She had a heart attack. I was in the mountains, and Tulip was with my parents in Beirut. There was a lot of fighting, and all the noise scared her so much it caused the heart attack. I was really upset that I wasn’t there when she died. But my dad took care of everything.”
I took another hit, feeling high yet slightly unsettled. Loose change nestled in the sofa. Mike poured a bag of tortilla chips into a blue crystal bowl — my first taste of Mexican food. “Were you living in Beirut itself?” Mike asked between tokes. “In the middle of the war?”
“Yes. I was even shot at a couple of times. It’s crazy. You can’t imagine what it’s like.”
He smiled as he rolled another joint. “I can imagine. I did three tours in Vietnam.”
I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly. I was already stoned, feeling wonderful. “Did you say you were drafted three times?” Melanie was looking at me with a shit-eating grin. She passed me the second joint, stood up, and danced seductively to the music.
“No, drafted once.” He lay back in his chair, legs wide apart. “I reupped a couple of times.” He looked as stoned as I felt. I stared at his muscled calves.
“Why did you do that?” I slurred my question.
“I really don’t know.” He put his glasses back on, took them off, breathed on his lenses, and polished them with his T-shirt. Melanie walked through the beaded curtain into the kitchen and reappeared with a beer and a Coke in either hand, showing me both. I pointed at the Coke. Mike took the beer. “Who knows why we choose what we choose,” he said, reaching over to open my can of Coke. “Maybe because life in-country seemed to be more real than it was back in the world.” He smiled gently. “You doing okay? You need anything?”
“Tubular Bells” was playing, but I couldn’t figure out when the music had changed. Mike was saying something that sounded like “Plei Me Special Forces Camp.” I wasn’t sure I liked the music, even though I’d heard it numerous times before. “Battle of Ia Drang.” Mike’s left hand massaged my neck. “Beirut must have been horrifying, too.” Minuscule creases appeared on his forehead. “Sex and death, death and sex, or vice versa.” He held another joint to my lips with his right hand, and I took more drags. “M-60 machine guns gung ho.” I started seeing Linda Blair’s head rotating, and I couldn’t stop giggling. I tried to apologize to Mike but was unable to stifle my laughter. How could my father forget how Tulip died? My father told me he held Tulip in his arms as she had a heart attack. Now my father didn’t remember how she died. I wondered if I could forgive my father for that. The Nagel print was ugly. I wondered if anybody in the world had a Nagel original. I took a sip of Coke and stuffed my face with tortilla chips. One of the throw pillows had a honeycomb pattern that made me dizzy. I kept attempting to figure out whether it was a black pattern on a white background or vice versa. I laid my head back on the chair, looked up at the cottage-cheese ceiling. I snapped my head back quickly. “I just thought of Hendrix and got scared,” I said loudly. I was alone in the room.
“Tubular Bells” repeated itself. Crumbs of tortilla chips remained in the crystal bowl. I pushed the bowl until it fell off the table and cracked.
Melanie emerged from the bedroom adjusting her skirt, hobbling on one shoe, the other in her hand. “It’s midnight,” she said cheerfully. “We don’t want to be too late.” Mike followed her out, wearing only boxer shorts.
I stood up while Melanie applied her lipstick, fixed her hair at the mirror. “It was nice meeting you,” Mike said. I walked out the door without replying.
Melanie drove the Cadillac back to the hotel. I pulled down the visor and looked at myself in the mirror. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Do you think I have ugly teeth?”
“No, they’re not ugly. If you think they are, they can be fixed, but I think they’re cute — sexy, even.”
“Not sexy enough for you to have sex with me,” I said, staring straight ahead. I felt her hesitation. “Don’t worry,” I added. “I don’t want to have sex with you anyway.”
“I know,” she said, shyly and evenly. “I didn’t think you did.”
One minute my sister was talking to me, whispering quietly about nothing in particular, and the next her voice faded. Even in sleep, she seemed tense, her breathing more hamsterish than restful. I slowly lifted myself off the floor. The muscles of my lower back and hamstrings groaned and objected. I walked around the bed toward my father. He seemed to be incrementally imploding, as if his wan skin were unhurriedly devouring his insides, and his body would soon collapse upon itself once the meal was finished.
When it would get to be my time to leave, I hoped I’d go quickly, suddenly and unexpectedly, like Uncle Jihad, not like my father, and not like my mother.
I held my father’s hand and stroked his dry hair, willing myself to imagine a reflex, an indication of responsiveness to my touch. I wanted to believe. I bent down and kissed his forehead, and my shirt grazed the ventilator tube. I felt an urge to take an iron bar, smite the machine, crush it. The pathetic rage of the impotent.
I kept praying for some form of movement from my father. I bent my face into the slit of his line of sight, hoping my dimly lit familiar and familial face would comfort him.
Once, when I was eight or nine, my parents took me to London, my first visit to the brooding city. My mother had wanted to walk in Hyde Park. My father, who never understood why people still walked, decades after the automobile had been invented, said he’d come along because he didn’t want to stay in the hotel by himself. We left the lobby through the revolving doors and were inundated by a weaving multitude of people. My mother turned back into the hotel, but my father stood his ground, mesmerized. He held my hand and watched as a sea of pale skin engulfed him. He looked confused for a moment, and then he smiled and said good morning in Lebanese to a passerby in a suit. The man smiled and replied in Lebanese as well. He bowed his head, and his palm sought his heart in an exaggerated gesture. He nodded toward me in acknowledgment and continued on his way. The Lebanese face, unknown yet familiar, had moored my father. Happy again, he led me back into the hotel.
Uncle Jihad didn’t answer my knock on the locked bathroom door. I walked around to his room, still early-morning groggy. He wasn’t there. I knocked on his bathroom door, then tried it. It was unlocked. Uncle Jihad sat on the toilet, his pajama pants around his ankles, his head slumped, his eyes staring at a spot on the carpet. The bathroom smelled of shit. I suppressed an urge to scream. I rushed over, shook him by the shoulder. His skin felt cold. I recoiled. I bent down to look at his face. His eyes were lifeless. I searched for a pulse on his wrist. None. I broke into silent tears. Shaking, I walked out of the bathroom into the orange corridor, held on to the metal railing for support. My father sat at the dinette table, drinking his coffee and reading the paper. Melanie sat opposite, already dressed and made up.