I, The Divine

~ ~ ~

“Here I am, the wretched city, lying in ruins, my citizens dead. you who pass me bewail my fate, and shed a tear in honor of Berytus that is no more.”

— UNKNOWN SIXTH-CENTURY POET

1.

The Kent billboard says Evolve in six languages. Hardly recognizable, Beirut has changed much in the last seven months, billboards obscuring brisk construction of high-rises, bright-colored ads exhorting me to listen to avant-garde Lebanese radio stations, to switch cell phone services, to attend the absolute Millennium event. Beirut at the turn of the century. A relic remains, Bruce Willis announcing he is the last man standing, an ad for a film that had played in Beirut at least three years earlier. A short, pockmarked building flickers briefly on my right. A mosque’s crescent moon on a tall steeple glides by.

We speed along the new highway connecting the airport to the center of town. The trip now takes only ten minutes. My ex-husband sits next to me in the sumptuous backseat of the Mercedes. Black everywhere, his suit, my dress, the car’s leather.

“You don’t have to go directly to the hospital,” he says, holding my hand gently. “He’s no longer in any danger. Why don’t we unload the bags at home and you can unwind?”

“No, I’d rather go to the hospital.”

He has been reassuring me for the last twenty-four hours, his call at home, my call from Charles de Gaulle, but I know from experience he can easily lie to me over a phone if he wants to. Face to face, he cannot. I know his every nuance. He faces me with his easy smile, not the camera-ready smile, pencil thin, no teeth showing, heavy eyebrows crunching in the middle of his brow. He is relaxed, not performing; himself, not the politician.

Like most Lebanese, the driver considers the newly painted white lines a mere suggestion and drives in the middle of the road. I look out the window at the other cars, getting close to the city’s center, traffic slightly heavier. I remember being driven on this stretch of road by my father when I was younger, in his brown Oldsmobile, a happy drive because we would go to a supermarket-cum-department store the entire family loved. The building is still there, but it is abandoned, a malnourished edifice, the new highway no longer leading to it. In that department store, I rode my first escalator. I could not have been more than four or five. My sister Amal and I went up and down those escalators a thousand and one times while our parents shopped. Every now and then, we watched a yokel stare at the moving machinery, wondering fearfully how to get on. Amal and I would smile confidentially, cunning sophisticates in the land of greenhorns. All of a sudden, I hear the car’s siren go off, shocking me out of my languid reverie. The driver wants the other cars out of the way. My ex-husband is a member of parliament and he always has the right of way.

“My God, Sarah,” Omar says suddenly. “How do you keep in such good shape?” He openly ogles my crossed legs and short skirt.

2.

The afternoon light’s yellow dominates the fluorescent bulbs’ blue, warm shadows overpowering the cool, long prevailing over short shadows. A horde of people sit in the sterile waiting room of the cardiology unit, most of them family members I have not seen in ages. My stepmother, Saniya, entertains, chatting with everybody, further evidence my dad’s condition is not as serious as first feared. Her face brightens on seeing me. My sister Majida rushes up to me, giggling. “You’re here,” she says. “He’s okay. The diuretics finally worked. The water is out of his lungs.”

“I’m glad you came,” Saniya says, leading me arm in arm toward my father’s room. “I wanted to call and tell you he’s okay and you didn’t have to come, but you’d already left. He’s being discharged tomorrow.”

“It’s quite all right. Now the whole family can spend the New Year together for the first time in I don’t know how long.”

“The Millennium, not just the New Year,” she says, laughing.

My father sits propped up by many pillows on the angled hospital bed. Around him sit my sister Amal, my brother, Ramzi, and two men who introduce themselves as acquaintances of my father, there only because duty requires their appearance.

“Ah,” my father yells, “the princess is finally here.” His pleasure reflects more than my arrival. This has been his third brush with death in the past two years. “She’ll only show up if I’m dying.”

I bend over and kiss him, noticing how much he has aged. My father’s face has always been asymmetrical, but lately it is exaggerated. His left eye is lower than his right, and now his left cheek is slack. His face gaunt. The mustache, his ever-present trademark, is shaved. When he smiles, I see nothing of the man I know.

To the side, I notice Saniya’s foldup bed. My father can never sleep if she is not in the same room.

“I knew this was a hoax.” I sit down on a blue plastic chair facing him, feel my rear end sinking slowly. “You wanted me to come here because you didn’t know how to celebrate the Millennium without me, but were too embarrassed to ask directly. Do you think I’m naïve? Please come, Sarah. Your dad’s sick and wants to see you. My ass. You guys were bored stiff and needed some excitement. Well, here I am.”

“Well,” my father snaps, “when are you moving back?”

“Soon,” I lie.

3.

We stand outside, Amal and I, seeing Omar off. He lights another cigarette. “Here, before I forget,” he says, handing me a cell phone, smaller, more complicated than the one he gave me during my last visit. He pats his pockets, a tick he has had since I have known him, and raises his hand, signaling his driver, who drives down the hill toward us. “I do have to go. I’ll send you your car this evening.”

The car draws up at the curb. I kiss his cheek before he climbs into it. “Thank you.”

“Talk to your son, will you?”

“I’m not talking to him about his tattoo. He already told me about it and is trying to convince me to get one.” I smile.

“Not the tattoo,” he says. “I don’t care about that. It’s his bad taste in clothes. All these garish colors all of a sudden. He wore bright red pants last night and some awful green paisley shirt from the seventies. It’s embarrassing.”

Amal takes me by the arm as the car speeds away. “Let’s take a walk and grab some coffee.” I lay my head on her earth-tone angora sweater. She sure loves her angoras.

4.

When I was five, my father took Amal and me to see Mary Poppins at the Strand Cinema on Hamra Street. My sister Lamia preferred to stay in her room as usual. While Julie Andrews sang “With a Spoonful of Sugar” and luscious colors poured out of the medicine bottle, a spark ignited near the screen and the whole theater went dark, an impenetrable black. Someone screamed, “Fire!” Everyone panicked and rushed for the sole exit. My father spoke calmly, telling us to hold on to each other. He loudly admonished the stampeding crowd. “Be careful of the children.” Louder. “It’s only a short. Calm down, everyone.” Amal and I were suddenly separated from him. I heard him call our names, over and over, but his voice grew faint. He was being pushed toward the exit. Amal squeezed my hand. I held hers with both of mine, terrified. I felt myself being pushed behind. I pressed myself against her back, held onto each of her arms, onto the angora sleeves. I placed my head on the back of her sweater, relying on her to lead me out, to save me. “Don’t push me,” she yelled at someone. She kicked a man’s shin. “Let us through,” she screamed as she maneuvered us between anonymous thighs and hips. She stomped on toes. I thought the unkempt hair of her blue angora would be the first thing to catch fire as I buried my face deeper. Up the stairs and into the light, my father’s voice grew stronger. The crowd thinned after the bottlenecked stairs. Amal moved us confidently toward my father. Down on one knee, he hugged us.

“We kicked ass,” I said, regaining my voice.

They both laughed.

5.

Starbucks on Hamra Street looks like its counterparts in America, the faux-modernist murals, the pimply-faced teenagers behind the counter, the logoed coffee mugs. It is swamped, Beirut’s latest in place, to see and be seen, clamorous, the noise of chatter exceeded only by the ringing of cell phones. When Starbucks flung its gates open, Beirut’s elite returned to Hamra Street after an absence of more than twenty-five years. The Mercedeses and BMWs reappeared, cautiously claiming parking spaces that once belonged exclusively to them.

“One grande low-fat latte and one cappuccino for here,” the cashier announces. She writes something down on two cups and passes them to the boy working the espresso machine. The boy repeats the order earnestly, a diligent echo.

“How may I help you?” the cashier asks the woman in full-designer regalia, suit, pumps, jewelry, and sunglasses. The cashier speaks English with a horrible attempt at an American twang. The woman does not look at her, but at the floor.

“Where did you get these tiles?” the woman asks, in English with a Lebanese accent. She holds her Prada handbag, brown with clear plastic handles, close to her. The woman repeats the question, deliberately, as if talking to someone mentally handicapped, still not looking at the girl. The girl looks at her co-cashier, who shrugs her shoulder. The espresso boy arches his eyebrows.

“She’s asking about the floor,” Amal says in Arabic. Both woman and girl stare at us.

6.

We sat on a hooker-green sofa, on the basement floor. Starbucks is large, covering over two floors as well as the sidewalk. Multiple rooms and sections surround a huge fireplace.

“Why do you let him get to you?” Amal asked between sips of coffee. Everything about her appearance whispered comfort. Her clothes were elegant, yet unthreatening, a dark cream dress and a burnt-sienna sweater. Her black hair was braided and pinned. Unobtrusive makeup on a soft face, her eyes tender. None of the stress of my father’s hospitalization seemed to have affected her.

“I don’t know, but I’m getting better. Now it takes me about five minutes to revert to being a little girl. It used to be instantaneous. I’m constantly torn between trying to please him and wanting to hurt him. I’m going to be forty in a few months and he still treats me like a child.”

“It’s because he doesn’t see you that often. If you lived here, he’d get tired of it.” She chuckled. “At least he’ll stop asking you to move back. He used to get on my case all the time, but he doesn’t much these days. I miss that.”

I moved my coffee cup back, as if to throw it at her. She pretended to duck, laughing.

“He loves you,” she added. “He wants you near him. We all do.”

“I can’t move back for many reasons,” I said, slightly unsettled. I hated having to repeatedly enunciate my reasons for not wanting to live in Beirut.

“Name one.”

“Okay, you know what I hate? I hate the fact that in all of Lebanon, one can’t find a box of tissues that dispenses one tissue at a time. No matter what brand I get, I always have to pull three or four at a time to get one. Doesn’t that bug you?”

“Get serious.”

“Here’s another. Last time I was here, Omar took me to his gym. It was so luxurious. They had the newest machines but no one really used them. Everybody used the Jacuzzi and that was it. But my god, what a Jacuzzi! It can fit a hundred people easily. It had fountains in the middle. There’s a bed in the damn Jacuzzi. Twenty people can lie on it. No joke.”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

“This country is just appearances.”

“And America isn’t?”

“Yes,” I said, unable to control my grin, “but in America, tissue boxes dispense one tissue at a time.”

She giggled. “You’re terrible. You keep saying that as a family we don’t talk, that we try to bury our problems, yet every time I try to talk to you, you start making jokes and really bad ones too. You no longer have any good reasons for staying in America, do you?”

“My life is there. I have nothing here anymore.”

She smirked. “And fuck you too.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t really. We’d love to have you here. I need you. Your son needs you.”

“Beirut holds terrible memories for me,” I said slowly, measured.

“Stand in line. Come back and deal with them.”

“Can we talk about this some other time? I just arrived. I promise I’ll think about it and we’ll talk another time.”

“Okay, I’ll hold you to that.” She took another sip of coffee. “And you’re wrong. There are many tissue boxes that dispense just one. You’re just getting the cheap brands.” She smiled mischievously.

“Come here,” she said. She reached over, hugged me. “Welcome back,” she whispered in my ear. She kept holding me close. I squeezed her tighter, swallowed by her warmth, my shoulders relaxing. I felt caffeinated faces registering our inappropriate behavior. Across the room, the eyes of a framed Latino coffee-picker smiled at me. I smiled feebly back at him. Next to the photo was another of a red cup filled with black coffee on a yellow-and-blue plaid table cover.

7.

My father, who had an unhealthy addiction to Chuck Norris’s Walker, Texas Ranger, lay in bed staring up at the television. Majida and Saniya watched the episode, but I could not. I was able to tune out the dialogue but could not do the same with the show’s music.

My father had black, expressive eyes that wore a look of reproach as if I had committed an inexpiable sin, accusing me, not of something, but of everything. When I was younger, they were magical eyes, frightening, brimming with both promise and menace, both anxiety and wonder. They shone with an intoxicating, mesmerizing energy that both repelled and attracted me.

In the cheerless hospital room, as he watched Texas Ranger, I saw his distracted eyes, still beautiful, no longer threatening, neither dangerous, nor auspicious.

8.

“Pizza Hut delivers,” my half-sister, Majida, said. “Or we can have Chinese. I’m up for anything.”

“Why don’t you girls go home?” Saniya stood up and stretched. “We’re doing fine here.” She took my father’s gray-blue food tray and placed it outside the room. On the tall nightstand beside my father’s bed were two oranges, a red apple, an off-white phone, a box of tissues, a plastic bottle, and a half-full glass of water.

“I want to see the end of the show,” Majida said.

My father’s breathing was flabby and shallow, with a slight gurgling sound like the soft hookah aspiration of a young boy. “At least until the fight,” he said. Walker always ended with Chuck Norris and his black sidekick beating up on the bad guys, followed by commercials, and then the final joke, where the regulars of the show convened to shoot the breeze. My father watched the fight, but turned the television off before the joke, which he never found funny.

“Why don’t you go home?” I said, looking at Saniya. “I’ll spend the night. You take a break.” Both my parents looked at me quizzically, as if I had spoken in Latin. “I’m serious. I’d like to stay here for the night. You go home and rest.”

“He’s being discharged tomorrow,” Saniya said. “We can all sleep in our own beds then. You go home and see your son.”

“Be quiet, both of you,” my father snapped. He turned the volume up with the remote control; his hand had a slight tremor. Chuck and chum punched, kicked, and karate-chopped six bad guys, cowboy hats burst in every direction.

9.

Saniya, in blue sweats and tennis shoes, pushed her arms against the wall outside the room, curved her back and stretched her calves. She looked like a Sunday jogger getting ready for a run.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked, softly.

“It’ll give us time to talk.”

“He’s going to sleep soon. I don’t see how you can talk much. You’ll be able to see him as often as you wish when he’s back home.”

In the room across from us, Pavarotti sang on television with Ricky Martin and Mariah Carey, a pre-Millennium concert.

“I rarely spend time alone with him,” I said. “I’d like to tonight. Even if he’s sleeping.”

“Come, walk with me. I need the exercise.” We walked slowly down the corridor, arms entwined, looking discreetly into each room, evaluating each family’s story. “Where’s your son?”

“He called me from McDonald’s half an hour ago. He’s going out dancing tonight. I won’t see him till tomorrow morning.” She was cozy, warm, and comforting.

“You should talk to him about eating too much junk food.”

She stopped when we got to the waiting room, looked outside at a giant green laser dueling the dark sky.

“That’s Beirut 2000,” she said. “CNN says Beirut is the third best place to be for the Millennium, after Paris and Cairo. Everybody has been celebrating for days and it’ll go on afterward too. James Brown is coming.”

“I guess I’ll have to miss that.”

She smiled, cleared her throat. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

“It’ll be fine,” I assured her. “There’s nothing specific I want to talk to him about. I won’t upset him. I just want to be with him.”

“I’ll get my stuff.”

10.

While I was visiting Beirut years ago, my son, my father, my ex-husband, and I went to see The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The war had recently ended, a few old movie theaters had reopened, running on large generators.

“It’s been years since I’ve seen a movie in a theater,” Omar said. Once the film began he worried, considered it inappropriate for Kamal, who slept between opening and closing credits while his father fretted. I sat confused, unable to understand the film, yet enraptured by Daniel Day Lewis and Juliet Binoche.

“Well,” my father said, walking out of the theater, “at least they got the unbearable part right.”

11.

“Close the door,” my father said as he leaned across to the nightstand and withdrew a cigarette and a box of matches from the drawer.

“What are you doing?” I asked and moved quickly toward him after closing the door. “You can’t smoke in here. Give that to me. You’re not even supposed to be smoking.”

I put out my hand, he crossed his arms, hid the offending cigarette behind his underarm.

“Give it to me,” I said.

He shook his head. “Let a dying man smoke in peace.”

“I’ll call the nurse.”

“Who do you think gave this to me?”

I sat on the bed, perplexed. He smiled, realized he had won, and lit up. He took a short drag, his wrinkled, quivering hand covering his mouth.

“When did you start again?”

“I never stopped,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Don’t worry. I’ll smoke only half.”

Blue smoke curled from the tip, spiraled outward, rising toward the fluorescent lights. He looked at the chair next to his bed, Saniya’s usual seat.

“I’m surprised she lets you smoke.”

“She doesn’t know. No one knows.”

“She knows.”

“I don’t smoke in front of anyone. They all nag too much.” He grinned impishly, arched his left eyebrow. He took a last drag and extinguished the cigarette in the half-empty glass on the nightstand.

“Here,” he said, handing me the glass. “Get rid of the evidence.”

I went into the bathroom, heard him say, “I’m the great deceiver.”