Muhammad Abi Samra - Beirut Noir

Maya: No, it’s normal.

Walid: If I died right now, what would you do?

She didn’t know what to answer at that moment, but as usual when she couldn’t find the appropriate response; her answer was harshly sarcastic without her meaning it to be.

Maya: I’d get out of there, of course, in case they suspected me of something.

She glanced at the bar and found the hunchbacked man staring at her. He smiled at her again and then she turned away, perhaps flinching a little. There was something strange about this man. She took her pack of cigarettes and went out to smoke and get some air. Walid was also there talking on the phone to his English girlfriend. She was far away but she could still hear some of what he was saying since he was talking in a loud voice. It seemed that the English girlfriend was checking on her plants and her cat; he was reassuring her that he was watering the plants and giving the cat her medicine every day... that the cat was still suffering from diarrhea but had improved a little bit. She imagined Caveman watering the plants and wiping up cat shit so she wasn’t able to keep herself from bursting out laughing when he walked over to her.

Walid: What’s up?

Maya: Nothing — I saw something that made me laugh.

Clearly he didn’t understand, but he smiled at her anyway. As they started to go back inside, her cell phone rang. She looked at the screen and it was a number from outside Lebanon — Khalid, of course — so she quickly moved away from Walid and answered.

Khalid: Hey, what’s up? Sounds like it’s noisy where you are — you out?

Maya: Yeah, I’m at Abu Wadih’s.

Khalid: I just got back home. I’m frozen, the temperature was -5 when I was coming back.

Maya: Whoa. Warm yourself up, habibi.

Khalid: Yeah, I will, I’m sitting under a blanket now, I can’t move it’s so cold. Are you going to stay out late? I can wait up so we can talk on Skype.

Maya: No, not late. I’ll leave in a bit. But if you’re tired, sleep, habibi, no problem.

Khalid: Who are you hanging out with?

Maya: Miriam and Lina.

Khalid: Listen, habibti, take a taxi if you want to go back home by yourself — don’t take a servees.

Maya: Okay, fine, habibi, yellah, bye.

She hung up the phone, surprised at Khalid’s insistence that she take a taxi home. She really wanted to believe that this was a sign that he cared about her, but this kind of care for her safety and security had only appeared after he left the country. When they were together in Lebanon he didn’t care about things like that. Many times when she’d left his house alone at night he wouldn’t offer to go with her. Why was he so worried about her now? Isn’t he the one who’d left her alone here?

She went back inside and noticed that the hunchbacked man was no longer staring at her. For a second she thought she’d figured out who he was, but she bumped into someone passing by and the thought escaped her. She wanted to get back to the table and gather her stuff fast, since after Khalid’s phone call she felt that something was constricting her breathing — she needed to leave... and quickly. She didn’t find Walid. She sighed deeply, grabbed her purse, and rushed outside.

No doubt she’d been walking aimlessly for ten minutes or more before stopping. As soon as she did, her breathing started to even out. She felt cold and realized that she’d forgotten her coat at Abu Wadih’s. But she had absolutely no desire to go back there this evening. She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and observed the Hbeish guard station in front of her. Strange that her legs had brought her right here. She felt her phone vibrating in her bag; she’d gotten a new message. She thought that it would be from Khalid but when she looked at it, it was from Walid: What happened? Where’d you disappear to?

She considered responding, You’d better get up and go home and water your plants, it’s the right thing to do. Of course she didn’t do that, but she thought it was strange that he still had her number. She wondered what would happen if she decided to change her number without telling Khalid. What if she completely disappeared? Would he come search for her, or would he stay over there in Canada waiting for her on Skype? Probably the latter. She already feels it’s another woman Khalid is waiting for on Skype, a ghost woman coming home every night to repeat the same electronic expressions so he could be reassured that everything was under control in the virtual love nest he built for her after he left her. What if she programmed Skype to speak to Khalid instead of her, would he even notice the difference?

She decided to keep going toward the lighthouse, though it felt a little reckless — or actually a lot reckless, especially at this time of night when no one went to the Corniche except a very select group chosen from the elite of the most hopeless social-welfare cases in Beirut and lovers who weren’t lucky enough to find any other place to be alone. But this was exactly what she needed right now. She remembered the first night she slept over at Khalid’s place in his old apartment, in Ain el Mreisseh near the sea, and how restorative that next morning was, when they sat together on a wooden bench on the Corniche. The mere sight of an empty boat in the middle of the sea frightened her and she asked Khalid about it. He told her that it must belong to a fisherman who was taking a swim nearby. Then he said that when he died he hoped they’d put him in a boat like that and set it on fire. He said that he’d seen that in a film. He spoke about his death with a strange passion and romance, adding that he was imagining that they’d grow old together. When they died they’d have both of their corpses put on the same boat and pushed out to sea, toward the unknown. She didn’t have any clearly formulated reaction to this conversation. Should she be happy that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her? But no, that isn’t what he’d actually said. He didn’t mention anything about their lives together, only about their death...

The sound of a motorbike interrupted her meditations and she quickly moved on, afraid. She feared that the person driving the motorbike was the hunchbacked man from Abu Wadih’s, but he quickly disappeared into the darkness of the street before she could be sure. She kept walking cautiously for a few steps and then the motorbike came back toward her, really fast, as if it were going to run her over. This time she looked at the driver’s face to confirm her doubts, retreating. It was the hunchbacked man. And he stopped his motorbike suddenly. She screamed so loudly that she even frightened herself, but the man didn’t appear to have heard anything.

Maya: What do you want?

He kept staring at her with the same expression he’d had a little while before at Abu Wadih’s. She couldn’t make out any emotion on his face — he didn’t seem perturbed but rather eerily calm. A moment passed before she had the expected reaction to this kind of situation, which is to try to escape quickly. She was more skilled at running away from herself. Facing actual danger at that moment, it took her a relatively long time to comprehend that it was real and didn’t just spring out of her imagination. Despite this late realization, she finally obeyed the urge to escape, running surprisingly quickly given her small legs and her lungs destroyed by cigarettes. The only problem was that she ran the wrong way and darkness was advancing along with her. She wasn’t completely aware of where she was going, she could only hear the roar of the motorbike ringing in her ears as it got closer and closer. It seemed as though her defeat was imminent...

She didn’t know how it happened. Did she fall on her own or crash into the motorbike? But she found herself kneeling on the ground and the hunchbacked man standing across from her staring at her in the same way. She tried to get up but her knees wouldn’t support her. She felt that they were injured but she didn’t look at them and instead kept trying to stand. Suddenly the man lurched from where he was, grabbed her, and helped her get up, but then held firmly onto her arm, preventing her from moving. She couldn’t think of escaping this time, she was staring at the old building in front of her, not believing that she’d arrived here. She was standing in front of Khalid’s old building, all locked up and drowning in the darkness of the street. She remembered how sad she was when Khalid told her they would tear it down soon. Then she remembered the drawer where he used to keep her forgotten things. No doubt he’d made her another drawer in Canada and was reflecting on it with love and care at this very moment while she was here in the grip of this demented man. In this completely deserted neighborhood, no one would hear her if she screamed.